


Transistasis

by AceofHarts



Series: Homeostasis [3]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Sports, Explicit Language, Fluff, Multi, Underage Drinking, again way more focus on Eremin than the other pairings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-05
Updated: 2014-08-23
Packaged: 2018-01-25 19:37:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 45,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1660052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceofHarts/pseuds/AceofHarts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spring semester has started and brought with it a lot of mud, a lot of flowers, a lot of soccer, and a lot of dread about what happens after high school ends. Now that Armin is paying more attention to his own needs, Mikasa doesn’t have to worry about the boys so much, and Eren’s back to his usual action-oriented self—with one exception. For all that he and Armin have sorted themselves out, there’s been a suspicious lack of actual dating, and this time it’s up to Eren to tip the balance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

            Having dirt under his fingernails again was a relief. Yesterday’s rain left the soil cool, damp, and malleable between Armin’s fingers. The clouds still hung heavy and blue-grey, but today, Armin didn’t mind. It was his first day out in his grandfather’s garden since the snow had started to melt to ugly greyish mounds at the roadsides. There weren’t many weeds to pull, and the flowerbeds didn’t need any watering; his main purpose in being out here was just to touch the earth and see the first splashes of colour pushing their way up through the soil. Armin was years away from being an expert gardener. Certainly he knew far less about it than his grandfather did, and when it had come time last October to settle bulbs in the earth for the spring, he’d chosen those flowers which he was most certain to care for sufficiently. His ambition, however, was growing. University terms ended much earlier than high school ones; since he’d have that extra time on his hands, maybe next year he’d tackle something a little more difficult, a little more impressive. For now, he nurtured what he had.

            At the moment his bare knees were pressing into the earth before the daffodils, which were fresh and clean after the downpour. They were more striking in the sunlight, of course, but for now they were bright enough on their own. The wind still bit deeply enough that he could have justified wearing jeans, if he hadn’t had plans already. Shorts were requisite. As for the dirt, he suspected he was going to spend a lot of today skidding across the grass and the mud, so it was just as well to get a good healthy coating of it now.

            The hinges of the gate to the back yard creaked. Armin didn’t have to look over to know who it was. His grandfather was at work, and Mikasa’s shift would have just ended; even she wasn’t quick enough to have sprinted over here so soon. There was only one other person who would just let himself in like this.

            _Unless I’m about to be robbed or murdered_ , Armin thought—but the voice that called out belonged to the last person who was ever going to hurt him.   

            “Ahh, they’re already coming up, eh?”

            Armin smiled a little and shuffled over by about a foot so that he was situated before the next patch of flowers. These ones were bluish-purple and growing in clusters on their stalks.

            “A few of them are,” he said. “They’re not all where I put them, though. The squirrels must have gotten at them.”

            Footsteps started toward Armin through the wet grass.

            “That’s alright. Looks better like that anyway—gardens are weird when they’re all ruler-measured and perfect, you know?”

            “You’re not the one who has to cut the grass around that tulip.” He waved a hand over his shoulder, but if Eren looked at the little burst of red peeking through the grass, right at the centre of the yard, he didn’t pause to do so. He knelt beside Armin. His eyes were on the hyacinths. His gaze was intent, interested, warm—not quite gentle, but closer to it than most of his teachers would have thought possible. It wasn't that he never managed a soppy expression or a soft touch. The way he handled Armin's hair was and always had been nothing short of tender (with one early exception), and he had gotten an awfully silly look on his face when Historia had gone railing after the police who'd been badgering Ymir. Everyone had thought he'd fallen in love with her on the spot.

            That more or less summed the situation up. Seeing Eren being just quietly, softly proud or happy or encouraging was not unheard of, but it was rare enough that people tended to think that he was either out of his head or experiencing some other totally different emotion. He did not strike people as the kind of boy to make friends with alley cats and plump blue birds. Circumstances had to be just so, and Armin wasn't altogether sure what the conditions were. 

            “I’ll do it, then,” Eren said. “Hell, they’re looking pretty good already.”

            “I am _not_ going to call you over to cut the grass. Ever. I can do it myself.”

            “Without running over this tulip? Remember that time you almost went right over your own cord and Mikasa had to—?”

            “We don’t talk about that,” Armin said with severity that was only halfway an act. Eren snickered.

            “Fine. These, then.” He reached out and touched one of the hyacinths, just resting his fingertip against the blue of the petals. “You know what they mean?”

            Armin shook his head. Normally such an admission would have embarrassed him, but with Eren as with Mikasa he didn’t feel compelled to pretend to some infinite store of knowledge. 

            “I just planted them because they were pretty, and easy.”

            “They’re constancy. And the daffodils are…” Eren’s brow rumpled for a moment. “They’re respect, I think. Something like that.”

            “Why do you know so much about this, anyway? I wouldn’t have expected you to be interested in flowers at all, let alone abstract floral symbolism.”

            Eren shrugged loosely and sat back. He was dressed every bit as recklessly as Armin was, if more loudly—dark blue shorts, blisteringly orange t-shirt, and extreme indifference both to the cold and to the clash of complimentary colours.

            “You pick things up, right?”

            “How do you just casually pick up information like that?” Another shrug.

            “We should get going,” he said. “It’s probably going to rain again. I mean, I’m still not sure I get why we need to do this _now_ … It’s so early.”

            “You don’t have to go with me,” Armin said. "Mikasa and I can manage just fine." As he shifted to get to his feet, Eren twined one arm around his, tugged him over, and kissed the side of his mouth. It was delivered without direct comment, as if kissing was as natural a part of getting on their feet as any repositioning of their arms or legs.

            “I want to, though,” Eren said.

             It had been three months since Armin had kissed Eren, and although he smiled every time he thought about it, sometimes the guilt would rattle the expression right back off his face. Upon discovering Eren's romantic interest in him Armin had decided to let Eren settle his own feelings, and then he’d gone and mashed their faces together at the first temptation. The next morning neither of them had mentioned it. By the time Armin had woken up Eren had been poking around in the kitchen, trying to help Armin’s grandfather with breakfast. They’d gone about their business as normal, which was to say they’d spent most of the day lounging around, talking about school and movies and politics and soccer, and touching far too often without giving half a damn about whether the meaning of it had changed.

            Then there had been Historia’s party, just a few days afterwards. She’d been frighteningly keen on making sure Armin was prepared for the thing. It had made him a little insecure about his usual self-presentation. That had been temporary; it had ended when her motive for picking out fitted collared shirts in just _such_ a colour, and with _this particular_ tie and slacks that fit like _so_ , had become clearer. No real attempt had been made to hide her intention. She’d personally arrived on his doorstep to drag him to her party about half an hour before Eren and Mikasa were due to pick him up, and when he'd asked her what exactly she was up to, she'd said something about how she thought he and Eren could use some looking after. Once at her house, she’d hidden him away in the kitchen until his two friends arrived. Ultimately she’d had Ymir corner Mikasa with a fumbling conversation about job hunting. Armin had been ejected from the kitchen at just the right time to trip directly into the arms of an entirely defenceless Eren Jaeger while some disembodied yet excitable voice yelled about the mistletoe hanging overhead.

            That night, Armin had learned that alcohol would still burn his lips when smeared across them by Eren’s; he’d drunk the heat in without caring that they were in full view of both soccer teams and Historia’s other friends. It wasn’t as if he’d been riding some wave of boldness from the alcohol. He’d barely managed to sip his way through half a beer while confined to the kitchen to wait out his sentence. The kiss had made him dizzier than shots could have. They’d woken up sprawled together the next morning; Eren had had his head trapped in Armin’s shirt where the third button should have been fastening together the two halves. That had been a strange thing to wake up to, especially since Eren had been snoring softly into Armin’s undershirt and curled up like a contended cat. The various social media sites were full of pictures of it, Armin was sure. His own computer was too pitiable for him to have much of an online presence, so he hadn’t had to see the aftermath.  

            Since then the whole relationship had been surprisingly mild, given Eren’s normal tendency to run into everything headfirst and screaming. Their friendship had been much the same, but full of kisses on the cheek, the forehead, the nose, the hand, the temple. Rarely the lips, and never anywhere south of the jawbone. Armin happily accepted any physical affection he was offered and stole a few kisses of his own, but he suspected Eren was getting frustrated with himself about the absence of a clear distinction. There was a notable lack of a strictly demarcated before and after—a definition of what exactly they were now, to each other.

            Thinking that they couldn’t very well let snowstorms and Historia solve all their problems for them, Armin had brought it up once, in precisely those terms. “You’re Armin,” Eren had said. “That’s the most important thing.” And he’d been certain, and he’d been right, so Armin had let it rest.

            At least this time around they were both puzzled about it together, and at least this time they both understood how it was ultimately going to be resolved. Sometimes when there was a quiet moment in a movie or between homework questions, or when they happened to catch one another’s eye as they were walking home, Armin was sure that Eren was going to ask him. Every time, Eren would give a quick shake of his head and sometimes a sheepish smile. Not the right moment, or not the right idea behind it. Armin would give Eren’s hand a squeeze or his cheek a kiss, because it didn’t matter. Not to him. What was important was that Eren was with him, and they understood one another. They didn’t have to be dating for Armin to be satisfied; no official sanction or adherence to formal tradition was going to make him feel any more strongly for Eren than he already did, and always had. If that was what Eren wanted, though—if it would put that broad grin on his face more often—then yes, Armin wanted it. He wanted Eren, romantically; he had that, even if it was nebulous at times, and was sure as hell not going to hesitate about getting more.

            Except that this time, it was Eren’s turn. They both understood that.

            Armin’s phone thrummed against his hip before he could respond to Eren’s statement. He drew it from his pocket and found a message from Mikasa.

 

**I don’t think you’ll end up needing your jacket.**

**Alright. We’re on our way.**

**Did Eren even bother to bring his. I told him to.**

**It might be in his backpack. Did you end up inviting Annie?**

**She has work. I’ll get started.**

**We’ll be there soon.**

 

            “We have to go,” Armin said, picking up the backpack that had been sitting on the grass to his left. There was a buzzing in his lips now. It rattled through his whole head and for a moment obscured everything. More. More touching. There should be more touching. But he’d set down a plan for today. It could fall to bits later, once they’d finished. Not now while the timing still mattered. “Mikasa’s waiting already.”

            “We should hurry, then. She’ll just kick our asses all the harder if we let her get warmed up first.”  

            “Yeah. Want to run?”

            Armin suggested it knowing that Eren was going to outpace him—knowing that for Eren, ‘run’ inevitably meant ‘sprint.’ Maybe Armin would use a few shortcuts; maybe he’d manage to keep up; but at the moment none of that was important. He just wanted to feel the burn of exertion in his limbs and the slap of the pavement beneath his shoes. He just wanted to start moving. 

            “Hell yes,” Eren said, flashing an easy grin. Every expression seemed easy, the way he wore them now. The fact that he didn’t shoot the suggestion down with a ‘but you’re going to wear yourself out once we get there,’ or a ‘God Armin are you trying to die,’ meant a lot. It was part of how Armin knew that change was happening, even if it was slow. After all the frenzy and clatter of last semester, and after months of being treated as if he were made of glass, he and Eren had found their footing again. The grey winter months were over, and soggy though it was, spring was looking better than ever.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I have at least three other Eremin fics in mind (and progress made on two of them), but I thought I should get going on this one first. At least two of the others are probably going to be enormous, so I may start publishing one of them while this one is ongoing. If that starts to happen please don't think that I've abandoned this fic. I really enjoy it. 
> 
> Later chapters will be much longer than this one because I (still) have serious trouble keeping anything brief.
> 
> Anyway, thank you for your support for the first half, and I hope you like this next section!


	2. Chapter 2

            Mikasa was already out on the school’s back campus when Armin, panting, caught up with Eren. They'd been given that Friday off so the teachers could have a 'professional development' day, which meant that Mikasa, lean and muscular, was the lone figure on the field. Using this day for practice had been Armin's idea, to avoid bringing in half the teams when they saw the trio heading out there after class. Embarrassing himself in front of Eren and Mikasa was one thing, but he wasn't ready to go up in front of the rest of the team just yet.

            Eren was leaning his forehead against a twist of wire in the fence as he watched Mikasa warm up. She stood before one of the rusty sets of goal posts, kicking her and Eren’s greying old soccer ball off the crossbar. Without hesitating over where the rebound would go, she simply placed herself in its path and kicked the ball again. It hit virtually the same spot on the crossbar time after time.  

            “That’s just ridiculous,” Eren muttered. He and Armin passed through the gap in the fence and stepped onto the uneven ground of the campus. Mikasa, still intent on her task, didn’t look over to greet them; she didn’t even seem aware that they’d arrived. It was just as well, since Armin wasn’t quite ready yet to join her. He shrugged out of his backpack and pulled from it one pair of shinguards (which he kept far away from his nose), one pair of thick, high black socks (held similarly distant), and one pair of cleats. The shoes were plain black, with dust and cobwebs caught in their laces after their long stay in the basement. His grandfather had taken him to buy them when Armin had been in ninth grade, freshly pressganged into service on the soccer team. Eren and Mikasa had wanted to take him shopping for them, but Armin hadn’t wanted to tell them that he needed to go to the used sports equipment store, not the one in the mall with the bright plastic sign and the shiny, perfect rows of merchandise. That had been utterly pointless in the end, since Eren’s and Mikasa’s cleats had come from the exact same place, but it had been shortly after Armin’s grandfather had had to sell his car. At the time, Armin’s calculations about his future had been grim even by his usual standards. He’d started to feel a bit better when he’d been old enough to get an income of his own; he hadn’t felt then as if he was weighing his grandfather down quite so much.

            “Those socks look a bit…” Eren said, as he too emptied his backpack of equipment. Armin had already plopped onto the ground to remove his runners and put his shinguards on, and was straightening out the socks in preparation of wearing them.

            “Crunchy?”, Armin asked. That earned him a laugh.

            “Yeah. Did you wash them after last June, or what?”

            “Yes! They’re just a bit, ah…stale, I guess…”

            They were beside the point. The main feature of today’s pre-season practice was the pair of cleats. Armin tightened the laces carefully, triple-knotted them like he had ever since his very first face-plant, and then rolled his ankles in their sockets a few times.

            “They still fit,” he said. 

            “Why do you sound so disappointed about it?”

            “I was hoping I’d grown a bit, I guess.” Armin pulled the socks up so that they covered his shin guards more thoroughly.

            “Sorry shorty.”

            Armin sat up straighter.

            “Excuse me? You’re all of three inches taller than me. You’re not exactly Bertholdt.”

            “ _Pleeeeeease_ , Armin, you can’t fool me—your type’s not the towering giant sort, alright? I mean, Jean? _Annie?_ ”

            Armin’s expression went flat. Never in his life had he told anyone about that crush.

            “Who told you that?”

            “Mikasa! She worked it out in like, ninth grade.” That made sense, as the crush had come and gone between freshman and sophomore year. Armin considered himself quite good at disposing of crushes, actually. “I didn’t even know you liked girls, honestly. I never saw you get all moon-eyed over her like you did with Jean.”

            “You make it sound so embarrassing… Did I go ‘moon-eyed’ over you?”

            “No. Which reminds me. I’ve kind of been wondering about this—are you asexual, maybe?”

            To some extent, Armin was surprised to be asked. It wasn’t the sort of conversation he’d had with Eren or Mikasa before; it had never come up or seemed to matter. Obviously the situation with Eren now necessitated some new channels of communication, but all the same—it was strange to have this become important.

            “I’d been wondering that about you, too, actually…” Armin had decided that he wouldn’t be the one to bring it up. It had seemed possible that Eren was hesitating about asking him out because of anxieties along this line. He'd thought maybe Eren was nervous that Armin would be eager to hop into bed, or not interested in it at all. Now that he'd brought it up Eren laughed and scratched at the back of his neck, but he looked anything but fraught. “I’m…in that general neighbourhood, anyway. Grey, though, I think…? What about you?”

            “Ahh, we’re neighbours. Demi, turns out,” Eren said, as easily as if he was stating his date of birth. “Both romantic and sexual. Wasn’t sure about that last bit until, uh, recently—all of a sudden it was just whoa, hey, alright I was _definitely_ not familiar with this before.” It was Armin’s turn to laugh, and he did it harder than Eren's comment really required. He'd never thought about how this discussion might go, but if he had, Armin's forecast would not have been nearly this sunny. 

            “It was like that for me too! Because it’s so vague when people talk about it, right?” Eren nodded. “And then, um…it became clearer what exactly people _meant_ …”

            Eren nudged him with his elbow; he was grinning away.

            “Pop a Jean-boner during practice? Or a joint game maybe, for Annie?”

            “No!” It took a conscious effort for Armin not to drop his hands to the hem of his shirt and tug on it like he had when he’d been small and petulant. “I just hadn’t mentioned it because I thought it’d be awkward to say that it wasn’t you, first. Or…at all, so far.” Well, there was something he hadn’t really intended to say quite so bluntly. “But that definitely doesn’t mean I don’t like you—”

            Eren shook his head and pushed some of Armin’s hair back behind his ear. Out here on the field without the houses clustered close, the wind was distinctly wintry. All that meant was that the brush of Eren's fingertips against Armin's temple was all the warmer. 

            “Got it, got it," Eren said. "Don’t even worry about that. It's not the point. Just figured I should ask, you know? You’re not as much a ‘jump in without looking’ sort of person.”

            Armin nodded. Hell, it made him happy to hear all this—that Eren felt fine about this, that Eren felt nearly the  _same_  as him about this, that Eren understood. 

            “Yeah," he said. "Thanks. Now, I mean…I think we could _try_ , sometime… It might be fun, right? I’m sort of curious about it, and—really, even if we weren’t—” Dating wasn’t the right word. Armin ran through his internal thesaurus and came up with no suitable alternative. “—in this kind of relationship, there’s no one I’d rather experiment with than you.”   

            Seeing Eren blush was one of those experiences that never wore out. Armin remembered reading once that blushing was a social gesture—that you only did it because you felt other people’s eyes on you, since it was a marker of embarrassment or shame, and those hinged upon the social situation. He didn’t think it was true in all cases. Armin had seen Eren reprimanded by Mikasa often enough to know how exactly he wore shame. That was always a tensed-back, gritted-teeth, clenched-fist sort of affair immediately followed by slackened shoulders, lifting eyebrows, and sinking gaze. It was never pleasant to watch, even though any situation that sufficiently riled Mikasa probably required such an intervention.

            _This_ , however—this just now, with Eren glowing crimson beneath his olive skin, and with his eyes level and bright and his nose scrunching a bit to one side—this didn’t look like some subconscious appeal for social forgiveness. It didn’t look like it was for anyone’s benefit but Eren’s. And hell if he didn’t look like he was enjoying it.   

            “What are you talking about?”, Mikasa asked from about thirty centimeters away from Armin’s ear. Armin jumped. He hadn’t noticed that the rhythmic clang of her practicing had ceased. She was holding the ball and looking at him and Eren with perfect evenness.

            “Sex,” he blurted. Suddenly, that textbook explanation of blushing made more sense.

            Mikasa's eyes registered no surprise, annoyance, or disgust. She just bobbed her head once.

            “Good.” She reached out and patted Eren twice on the head. “Good. Talk it through first.” He flapped at her with both hands and then, once she’d cleared off, clamped his hands over his head to shield himself from further attacks.

            “Let’s just start,” he said. “Do you want to go first?”

            Mikasa thought it over.

            “Yes.”

            “Fine—go, then.”

            Mikasa and Armin walked towards the goal where Mikasa had been practicing. Armin drew nearer to the posts and then turned to face her. He set his feet apart on the grass. The earth was spongy and parted around his cleats. He thought about this to help smother the flutterings of some animal instinct to not stand between Mikasa and whatever it was she was aiming for. Unless she was actually engaging in a fight (most often intervening on Eren or Armin’s behalf), it wasn’t that she had a particularly bloodythirsty expression. It was just that Armin knew what she was capable of, and that it was much, much more than he was.

            That was part of the point. Armin’s main function on defence had always been as a sort of coordinator, there more to block off offensive avenues and keep the defensive line in order than to actually steal the ball from anyone. He was not content to stay like that, however. Sports scholarships were the best hope for a lot of people’s postsecondary plans; the more games they won, the more interest their teams would generate, the more scout would arrive, the more money would be on offer. There was no likelihood whatsoever that Armin himself could get funding this way, but the more opposing forwards he could stop, the better his friends’ chances. Armin could read percentages and statistics and economic realities easily enough, and even if his faith in himself routinely failed completely, he knew he could get better. This was what he had to do, and—more than that—it was what he wanted to do, for Reiner and Bertl and the others. It was what he wanted to do for himself, too, because much as his own voice rang between his ears and said ‘This is gross and sappy,’ this was the last season they’d have all together like this. He wanted to give what he could.

            Mikasa dropped the ball to her feet. After pausing for just a fraction of a breath, she darted forward with it. It was such a quick movement that Armin momentarily lost sight of the ball entirely—and in that moment, she was past him. He didn’t bother turning to chase her down. There was no way he’d catch her. All he’d be doing was watching her score. This time there was no resounding clang as the ball met the crossbar; there was just the swish of air as the ball shot straight between the posts.

            Once she caught up to the ball she kicked it back for Eren, who paused a second or two to prepare himself before he took his turn charging at the net. Eren was no less energetic than Mikasa, but he was slower and much more predictable, all straight lines and charges. They cycled through the routine for as long as they could, Mikasa then Eren, and on and on. After the first two complete rounds Armin had worked out Eren’s pattern, and a few beyond that he’d worked up enough momentum to actually insert himself into it. As he kicked the ball back to Mikasa for the third consecutive time rather than waiting for Eren to chase it down after a goal, Armin said, “If you’re holding back I’m going to be so mad.”

            One corner of Eren’s mouth tugged upward. Saying it had been unnecessary, but absolutely worth putting that smirk on Eren's face.

            “As if I’d risk pissing you off again—I like my dignity where it is,” Eren said. “I’m just warming up. You won’t stop me next time.”

            And he was right. As their practice (such as it was) wore on, Armin’s stamina dwindled, and Eren’s basic manoeuvres gave way to his more characteristic impulse-fuelled thrashing. Eventually Armin was lumbering heavy-limbed after even the most hopeless chances. He still managed to stop a few through flashes of brilliance that happened to coincide with bursts of energy, but the longer they played, the greater the gap.

            Mikasa of course was Eren’s main opponent, just as Eren was Armin’s, though opponent may have been too strong a word. It was just that Armin used Eren to gauge his own progress, just as Eren used Mikasa. As for the girls’ team captain herself, there was no one who could even come close. Annie, by now her girlfriend of about five months, was the nearest her team had to offer. They were competitive, as far as either of them could be bothered to compete—usually it was limited to score count and avoiding actually playing together. For all the silly teenage drama in their social circle, the threat of Annie mounting some kind of coup for the captainship or the status of ace had never arisen. Annie just wasn’t at the same level of skill, or at least wasn’t trying to be. Armin wasn’t sure whether that was lonely for Mikasa, or whether it was a point of pride, or whether it ever even crossed her mind at all. The way things had been changing lately for him and Eren, with conversations happening that probably should have years ago, Armin had started wondering more about his other best friend. He’d realized that he didn’t know what Mikasa actually wanted for herself, beyond maintaining Eren’s and Armin’s good health and relations with her and with each other. If Eren had been nursing a crush on Armin without Armin picking up on it, then Mikasa could have joined some secret military organization for all Armin knew. The neglect made his stomach squirm, especially after she’d been left practicing here by herself. 

            “We should stop,” Mikasa said after a long while. 

            “What? You can’t seriously be tired yet,” Eren said, though he himself was panting. Sweat was dripping down his temples and spreading in dark patches on his shirt. Armin’s concentration had been too filled up with tactics and analyses to notice it. Now that he did, a bubble of happiness swelled in his chest. Armin was gasping, and his knees were shaking; the wind was starting to bite at the sweat pricking up on his arms and neck. But he hadn’t fallen over yet, and he’d managed to wear Eren down. Armin had been out running a few times, but given the weather conditions, this was the first time they’d made any real attempt at practicing all year. Already, he was able to hold his own to at least some extent. 

            “No," Mikasa said. "I just think we’ve done enough today.” Eren’s glance flicked over to Armin.

            “Yeah, alright. You guys going to study?”

            “Do you want to?”, Armin asked Mikasa. She nodded. “You can come too, Eren.”

            “Nah, it’s alright. I’ve got some stuff to do. I’ll be by later, though, for data management—Mikasa, you staying for that?”

            “Yes. We’ll make pancakes.”

            “My grandpa’s going to be home, I think,” Armin said.

            “We’ll make more pancakes.”

            “Why pancakes?”, Eren asked.

            “You like them, don’t you? I like them. Armin?” He nodded rapidly. “So we’ll make pancakes. Did you bring water?”

            “No.”

            “Armin?”

            Armin, whose breath was still scraping his throat raw, shook his head. Mikasa sighed and went over to the bleachers, where she’d left her own backpack. When she returned it was with two water bottles in hand, one of which she pushed offhandedly to Eren’s chest. “I’ll share with Armin. You go do what you were going to do.”

            “Let me get into my shoes first, holy fuck…”

            Once he was properly packed up, Eren wound up running home. Armin was happy to note that his pace was much slower than it had been on the way to the school.

            “Did you stop because I was getting tired?”, Armin asked once Eren had disappeared around a corner. Mikasa had said the two of them would share the water bottle, but she was letting him drain it for the most part. She held her hand out for the bottle, took a sip, and passed it back again as they started to make for the gap in the fence.

            “You’re doing well,” she said, as if this answered the question.

            It didn’t sting as much coming from her as from virtually anyone else on the planet. She was so absurdly good at what she did that he’d never felt all that compelled to even compare them.

            “I just thought it was pretty unlikely you were even _starting_ to get tired.”

            “I’ve been using the school gym all winter. You just haven’t been able to practice lately.” She didn't have to hesitate over how to reassure him. Even Eren probably would have fumbled for at least a moment or two, or mangled the response altogether. 

            “Can I come with you next time you go?” Then it occurred to him that she probably went during lunch, and that both Mikasa and Annie were frequently absent from the lunch table with great simultaneity, and that— “Actually forget it—”

             “You can,” Mikasa said. “We’re really just using the machines, and there are usually people from the rugby teams there anyway. It’s not a date.”

            “…Alright. Are you still—going on dates?”

            Mikasa actually smiled, though she didn’t turn it to face him the way Eren did. It was just the barest glance of a smile, and she sent it away down a side street.

            “We’re getting better at them. Eren still hasn’t asked you?”

            Armin shook his head. Everyone kept asking, like it should be a source of some great shame. Admittedly Armin was anticipating the change, but it wasn’t as if he was unhappy like they’d been. They’d found their stability, and if he hadn’t trusted it so much he wouldn’t have been willing to try something different. His friendship with Eren was strong enough to survive the wreck even if a romantic relationship collapsed beneath them. That was the most important thing.

            That said, for a moment Armin considered asking Mikasa if Eren had told her _why_ he wasn't starting anything. If there was some condition that needed to be met or change that needed to be made before Eren would ask him, Armin wanted to know what it was. In the end he stopped himself. Eren wasn’t shy. If there was some problem on Armin’s end, he was sure Eren would have talked to him about it. If there was something Eren had to sort out, Armin wanted to let him do that on his own terms. 

            “Sorry if we were late,” he said. "We should have gotten here before you, really."

            “Were you late? I didn’t notice.”

            That didn’t really make it better.

            “Is everything alright?”, he asked. Mikasa nodded.

            “You just seem sort of distracted, or…bored, or something… Do you even like soccer?”

            “Yes,” she said. For a moment, her surprise breached her usual aloofness, and her eyes went wide; then they found something to look at, far-off. Armin looked but didn’t see anything. “I—love soccer. It was my idea to sign up.” She and Eren had joined their elementary school team in seventh grade. Going to their games to stave off the boredom while his grandfather was at work was how Armin had learned to pick the sport apart. 

            “Really?”

            She nodded.

            “My parents signed me up when I was small…” On a walk with her parents one cloudless day she had seen a girls’ team practicing in the park and had toddled over to hug one of the soccer balls. It had been almost as big as she was; she hadn't been able to fold her arms completely around it. She didn’t remember for herself how it had happened—she didn’t know what team the girls had played for, or whether the grass had been soft beneath her tiny feet, or what her mother had said when she’d scooped her up and apologized to the coach. But it had been one of her mother’s favourite stories to tell, and it had prompted her to enroll Mikasa in the local girls’ league once she’d been old enough.    

            “O-oh,” Armin said. Mikasa talked about her parents so infrequently that sometimes it slipped Armin’s mind that she was not actually Carla’s daughter. “Is that why you wanted to play in elementary?” She gave a small shrug.

            “I’d forgotten about it until I saw the poster at school. Eren said he wanted to play, too. And it’s been…fun. With you, and Eren, and Annie, and everyone else.”

            “Are you sure you’re okay? You’re talking like you’re planning to run away from home.”

            “I’m not,” she said. “I’ve just been thinking about next year. Have you picked your program yet?”

            “Not really…”

            Mikasa already had, of course. She’d applied for kinesiology, which promised to be difficult, but he had no doubt that she would do well.

            “I thought you would do whatever your parents did. You have all those books still.”

            Yet another topic seldom broached. Armin wondered whether Mikasa was feeling nostalgic. She wouldn't have been the first person in their class to do so. 

            “I thought about it," Armin said, "but…I don’t know. Scientific fields get so specific, and I don’t know if I want to just dive into some really narrow crevice just because my parents did before me. I’ll sort it out when I get there, probably.”

            “That’s more like Eren than you.”

            “Well, he’s not always wrong… Oh, and pancakes?”

            Mikasa shrugged and readjusted one of the straps of her backpack.

            “Practice. It’s like cake, isn’t it?”

            Armin laughed. He couldn’t help it.  

 

            Eren ran home, ran to his dresser, ran into the shower, and then ran right back out onto the street again before his mother could as much as ask where he was going. His destination wasn’t far, and there was no reason he had to rush, but he wanted to be ready to go back over to Armin’s whenever Mikasa texted him to tell him they were done.

            Eren kept his head down when the other two were burying themselves in physics problems. Eren had nothing to do with the course and therefore didn’t need to be around. More importantly, Armin got this look on his face sometimes that made cold trickle down the back of Eren's neck. It was the same hard edge Armin had had in his eyes sometimes last semester. There were few things Eren liked thinking about less than the that winter. He certainly never mentioned how high the snow had piled on that bus stop bench, or how limp and lifeless Armin had been, or how his skin had been like ice beneath Eren’s hands and how Ern would have sworn for a moment that Armin was dead and that his own heart had stalled—

            No; no, that was no good. Eren’s hands kept curling into fists just thinking about it. It wasn’t as if he was afraid Armin was going to wind up like that again. The boy was assiduous now about timekeeping so that he would be well-rested. Sometimes he was quite merciless about cutting off study sessions or not swapping shifts to help out his coworkers. Often he’d let it slide if it was for Eren or Mikasa, or if Jean _really seriously was going to fail_ if he didn’t get some emergency tutoring—and he didn’t count movie marathons that went too late—but he was doing much better this term.

            _And Mikasa’s with him when he’s doing physics anyway, so it’s not like he’ll go off the rails._

            It was just that physics, at their high school, was not fair. It was not that their teacher did not know the material—it was that she never actually bothered to teach it. Rumours had spread that nobody had ever managed to get over a ninety in her class. Predicting that this would be a problem for Armin more emotionally than economically (though a hit like that to his average would move the Sina scholarship far out of reach), Eren had tried to convince him to just take law or something instead. He could pick up a remedial course the next year. Armin of course had not gone for it, and after that winter’s events Eren had been too nervous about damaging his pride to keep at it. 

            So far, it had been absolutely fine. Armin did get that strange frightening look in his eyes when he complained about physics or when he settled in to try problems that had never been adequately explained, but there was at least some fire behind it now rather than just empty, grey exhaustion. He was furious about the state of that class, and he wasn’t going to let it beat him. Eren just felt he should stay out of the way and let Armin kick its ass with Mikasa. There really wasn’t room for him there, and anyway he wouldn’t do them any good by worrying about them. He had to focus on what lay before his own feet, not theirs. 

            Honestly, the outlook was good. Eren had never loved spring this much since he’d been a little boy splashing in mud puddles. It meant bared forearms and bony knees; it meant t-shirts soaked in unexpected rainstorms and stringy wet hair turned deeper gold and brown and black than normal; it meant waiting under awnings and roof ledges and watching thunderstorms from creaky, slanted front porches. It meant all three of them wearing themselves out on the soccer pitch just for the hell of it, whether the season had started or ended or was in progress. 

            It also meant that Armin was worrying less about school, willingly or not. The boy was a summer child right through to the core of him. When the sunlight started to turn gold, Armin shone right back, even if it was through a layer of dirt from the garden. Especially then. It would be harder for him to concentrate on school once the skies started to clear up.

            If Armin was worrying less about academics than about the clouds and the wind and the flowers in his garden, it meant more of the responsibility for winning scholarships fell to Eren. He could not have been happier if he was a dog thrown a chunk of steak. Admittedly it wasn’t the normal kind of challenge he liked. It wasn’t a face-to-face confrontation in a school hallway or soccer pitch—but the consequences were more tangible now after that last winter. If scholarships were the new battlefield, then so be it. It wouldn’t be hard to muster the willpower.

             His footsteps thudded to an eventual halt on the wall-laid boards of a wide, painted porch. He was grateful that when he knocked, the door was opened not by an adult with an arched eyebrow and judgemental glare but by Historia. She was one of the few people on the soccer team who came from a properly ‘good’ neighbourhood, meaning one with orderly gardens and spindly young trees and fewer police cruisers trawling for teenagers. However, Historia spent virtually none of her time there under her parents' purview. It was Eren's pure good luck that she was home and not off ranging around other neighbourhoods or the dark streets of the flagging downtown with Ymir's arm thrown over her shoulder.

            “Hey,” Eren said.

            “Hi Eren. Is it raining?”, Historia asked with some disconcertion before he could manage anything else. Eren shook his head.

            “I just jumped out of the shower. Can I talk to you for a minute? I could really use your help.” He saw the way her glance shifted to the side, as if she was about to look over her shoulder. There were voices from within the house—her parents carrying on a conversation. “It won’t take long,” Eren said. She stepped out onto the porch and shut the door behind her. As she leaned back against it she frowned at him.

            “Did you fight with Armin again? There’s really only so much I can do to help with that—”

            “No, it’s not Armin. Armin’s fine.”

            Historia had not grown up with Eren the same way Mikasa and Armin had, but she knew that look on his face all the same. Whatever was going on, and whatever he wanted help with, it was important enough to have put the Jaeger-certified scowl of determination on Eren’s face. Whether she helped him or not, he was going to pursue it.

            “What is it you want?”, she asked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one took so long; I forgot when I published the last chapter that I was going to be busy for a while, so it made for a pretty long gap. In my hurry to finish it I rushed the editing, so as always, sorry if there are a lot of typos/mistakes. I'll read it through again sooner or later and clean it up a bit, but it's hard so soon after writing.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a really long chapter, so sorry about that in advance.
> 
> Also, there's some...situational talk in this chapter about sex, but it's all pretty indirect, so I didn't up the rating (especially since I thought people might get the impression that this fic was starting a gradual move towards E-rated content, which isn't the case). Anyway, if you're uncomfortable with that kind of content feel free to pass on this chapter, and if anyone thinks I should change the rating to M, please let me know and I'll be happy to do that.

            The day after their early practice session was Saturday, March twenty-ninth—the day before Eren’s birthday. According to general social law, anyone whose birthday fell on a weekend was permitted to use the entirety of it to celebrate. Since Eren had a longer shift at work on the Sunday, when Mikasa had asked him which day he wanted to focus on, he’d chosen Saturday. He’d done this somewhat thoughtlessly. The boy himself did not attach any real significance to his birthday, which of course meant that his entire social circle took up the enthusiasm as their own grim task. Eren’s parents had a day planned in the city with some of their university friends who might have had some sort of job opportunity for Grisha. It was unavoidable that they should go, so with a flurry of apologies from Carla, they set off early that morning and abandoned their son to the machinations of his friends.

            Eren tried to start the day like a normal Saturday, with a bowl of cereal, a television set to some mindless early-morning cartoons, and a text to Armin.

 

**What r u up to**

**I really like that you’re staging it already like I’ve got some sort of diabolical scheme.**

**Wow defensive**

**I meant like what r u doing do u want to hang out since my parents will probably be back tomorrow for the actual u know /birthday/**

**but hey if ur too busy plotting that’s fine**

**I thought you had work? I have a shift today too.**

**Yeah but after**

**U could like**

**Come over**

**?**

            That lone, detached question mark was a regrettable marker of the fact that Eren was still a fumbling babbling overjoyed mess whenever he thought about Armin and the fact that they got to kiss and touch and generally be close in ways they hadn't before. He wished there was a backspace function for texts already sent. Before he could say something else to help him appear a little less high-strung, Armin responded.

 

**You really have no idea what you’re in for, do you? I didn’t think anyone was being that subtle about it…**

**Who’s this anyone**

**More like…everyone.**

**What the fuck**

**What r they doing should I hide out**

**Take a new name**

**Ffs I don’t want to start again in a new country**

**I don’t think you should have to…? If you want to go hide out somewhere after work though, let me know. I can meet you there.**

**Alright im thinking someplace warm with lots of beaches so pack a swimsuit**

            Armin did not deign to dignify that with a response, so Eren turned back to his (now somewhat soggy) cereal and proceeded with his morning. He didn’t think too much more about the fact that it was his birthday until he was just about ready to go home that afternoon. When he checked his phone he found a text from Mikasa saying:

 

**I think I can get you twenty minutes.**

            The only response Eren could think of was to sprint home, traffic signals (and actual traffic) be damned. He didn’t even make it up the stairs to the second floor before there was a knock at the door. He was about halfway through the realization that Mikasa was not home and therefore must have been with the mob when the front door burst open.

            “We’ve got an order for one birthday loser, here!”

            Connie’s voice was unmistakeable, as was the waiter gag. He and Sasha both waited tables at some white-tablecloth, fine-wine restaurant (quite illegally, given their ages), and Connie liked to play up the seedy diner routine since he couldn’t vent the impulse at work. 

            There wasn’t any use in complaining as the whole babbling crew paraded into Eren’s house. Reiner and Mikasa were there, which meant he could either go along willingly or go along over one of their shoulders.

            “Hey, guys,” Eren said. He was cordially dragged along outside to the backyard before he got so much as a greeting or a ‘happy birthday.’

 

            The first thing Armin did when he reached the break room at work was check his phone. To his surprise there was only one message there, and it had arrived just moments ago.

 

**U had better be planning to turn up in this fuckin warzone**

 

            Armin didn't know the exact nature of the plan the others had come up with, but given the number of them involved, he'd assumed it would probably be a mess. 

 

**You have Mikasa there with you. You’ll be fine.**

            While he waited for a response Armin fished his physics textbook and a notebook from his locker. He did what he could to minimize his workload these days, but physics did still need to be done—and mastered, really. He was halfway through scrawling down the first equation when his phone buzzed again.

**Armin I’ve got Reiner and Connie in my back yard right now and I’m pretty sure theyre filling up water guns**

**Fuck**

**I was wrng its so much worse theyre water balloons oh god**

**Eren, are you hiding in the garage right now?**

            That had been where he’d sheltered during hide and seek or games of manhunt with the other neighbourhood children. They'd always hidden behind the lawnmower, behind or beneath the extra recycling bins, while Armin came up with a plan. 

 

**Yeah its me Mikasa and Annie rn I think everyone else is a team**

**We’re sort of screwed**

            Possibly Armin responded like he did because he was sitting, pencil in hand, with two dozen borderline impossible science questions before him. He was not at all feeling annoyed with Eren; he was just feeling like a battlefield commander. 

**You can’t seriously accept that you’re going to lose a water balloon fight on your own property on your birthday. Crush them.**

**Yes sir!**

 

            When Armin walked into Eren’s house shortly after three o’clock, he found eleven teenagers littering the living room, all shivering and at various stages of soaking wet.

            “I guess maybe doing that in March wasn’t the best idea…”, he said, feeling apologetic even though he'd had nothing to do with it. Ymir, who was sitting in front of the couch and wringing out Historia’s hair without much care for the Jaegers’ carpet, gave a heartfelt snort. A far-too-large, sopping jacket was hanging loosely around Historia’s shoulders, but the smaller girl hardly looked concerned about the size or the damp.

            “That was bullshit is what it was,” Ymir said. “You so much as use a water fountain anywhere near us, Reiner, and I’ll break your nose.”

            “You shouldn’t have stood so close to the hose, then,” Reiner said.

            “We were on a team!”

            “We never actually picked teams, though,” Bertl said.

            “Well an assumption got made and you assholes exploited it!”

            "You would have done the same," Historia said. "We just didn't think of it first." 

            “Eren, pick something else to do,” Mikasa said from her perch on top of the couch, in the interest of maintaining peace.

            “You say it like this whole mess was my idea,” Eren said. He was stretched out on the floor, staring at the ceiling and trying not to think about whether he was going to get reamed out by his parents for any puddles being left by his friends. “If everyone’s got a bit of money on them we could go to the movies or something.”

            “What’s the motive, here?”, Jean asked.

            “Maybe I just want to give all you dirty teenagers a chance to make out and vent some energy so I don’t end up with a bucket of water thrown over my head again! Is everybody in? I can probably pay for a couple extra tickets if anyone doesn’t have enough on them.”

            “Do you have a movie in mind?”, Marco asked.

            “Nah.”

            “Do you know when any are showing?”, Armin asked.

            “Let’s just go. We’ll sort it out when we get there.”

            They did, after a rather crowded bus ride (dubbed the Nerd Express by Reiner), and after much milling and muttering at the box office (and a few sheepish apologies from Armin and Marco to the unfortunate young woman tasked with getting their tickets). They all bustled along and into a theatre, most of them without actually having checked their tickets or overheard Eren trying to work out what movie would be best.

            “You can sit with Annie if you want,” Eren said to Mikasa as they made their way down the ramp. “I’m sitting with Armin, though, so the rest of you can go ahead and cry about it.”

            “I think we’ll cope somehow,” Jean said.

            They wound up being one of those awful hordes that took up most of the row and wouldn’t stop shifting and giggling and eating contraband candy and generally being a pain. Eren didn’t feel any particular burning along the back of his neck for it, though. There weren’t that many other people in this particular theatre anyway.

            That aside, he had a dark room and his best friend and seats so narrow that he couldn’t _possibly_ help it if he wound up leaning against Armin’s shoulder.

            On Eren’s other side, Mikasa was having similar ideas.

            “What movie did they pick?”, she asked.

            “Who cares?”, Annie said. “It’ll be the same thing as always. The sugary colourful heroes’ll win, and the villains’ll lose, and any complexity’ll go right out the—”

            Mikasa did not cut her off, but Annie could not help but be distracted by just how close her girlfriend’s teeth were to grazing her own lower lip. “Do you have something to add?”, Annie asked.

            “I can wait until you’re finished.”

            “When I finish this sentence you’ll regret saying that. This is going nowhere impressive.”

            “No I’m not.”

            Annie sighed shortly, put on the most sultry half-lidded glare she could muster, and said with overblown breathiness, “ _Window_.” Mikasa was kissing her the moment the word left her lips; Annie snorted into the kiss but didn’t break it. Mikasa did just as the first trailers started to show. She dropped her head onto the curve of Annie’s neck and watched with waning attention as trailer after trailer tried to snag her interest.

            The movie was in its final minutes, and was adhering faithfully to Annie’s predicted course, when Armin realized that his hand and Eren’s were folded together. They were hooked awkwardly beneath the jut of the armrest cupholder. Eren’s fingers must have snagged Armin’s without his noticing, and judging by the look of him, without Eren's noticing too. Eren was quite enraptured by the flickerings of the screen, slumped down on the seat with his feet propped up against the back of the chair in front of him. With his free hand he was shovelling popcorn into his mouth at a steady pace. The popcorn was his official present from Connie and Sasha—given despite Eren’s insistence that ‘Honestly guys we’re all broke, what’s even the point?’

            He looked good. Better than he should have, really, while slouching and eating popcorn, which is why Armin noticed at all.

            “You got kind of dressed up…?”, he whispered. Eren, startled out of his trance, blinked and looked over.

            “What?” Armin tugged on Eren's collar, which wasn’t the simple round t-shirt sort, but the angular, folded kind reserved for dress shirts. “Oh—no, not for this. I didn’t get time to change.”

            “You wore this to work?”

            “Yeah.”

            Armin squinted.

            “Why…? I thought you had uniforms.” Admittedly he’d never actually visited Eren or Mikasa at work, but he thought uniforms were standard at fast food chains.

            “Oh—no, it wasn’t _work_ work, it was—”

            Something in the movie exploded with such enormity that Eren forgot what he was saying, and Armin did too. The world of the film seemed to be very much like the one Armin lived in, except that everything was much more flammable and/or explosive. By the time things had settled down, and the surviving cast had rolled away in their expensive cars to fight another day, Armin had forgotten the question, and Eren had forgotten to answer it. Once the screen went dark and the credits music started to blare Eren stood up, stretched, finished off the last of the popcorn, and then reached down to grab Armin’s hand and haul him to his feet. Though his hand was greasy with the strangely gritty butter of the theatre popcorn, his grip was firm enough that Armin didn’t simply slip right back into his seat.

            “Did you like it?”, Eren asked. Armin didn't actually hear it. The film’s composer had for some reason scheduled an amazingly loud and frenetic guitar solo for precisely that moment. It was the question Eren always asked after they watched a movie, though, so Armin didn’t need to take up lipreading. He did wait until the others had started their shuffling, grumbling process out of the theatre to respond. It wasn’t until they were out in the hall that he spoke.

            “The plot was pretty thin, and the characterization was inconsistent. They just repeated the same loop for the score, no matter what kind of scene was playing.”

            “But did you _like_ it?” Armin scrunched his nose up but smiled anyway.

            “Yeah, I did. The point here is whether you did, though.”

            “Obviously _I_ did. I picked it. Thought it looked sort of fun. The heroine ended up reminding me a bit of Mikasa, though, which was weird.”

            “Because she looked like she could and would kick your ass?”, Jean asked from somewhere behind them. “Then again, everyone sort of looks like they could kick your ass. I mean, it’s taken you four months to work up the nerve to hold Armin’s hand.”

            “What, was the public makeout session not enough for you?”, Eren snapped.  

            “You were drunkish—I mean, you know that doesn’t actually count, right?” The grunt he emitted the next moment told Armin that Marco had elbowed him in the ribs.

            “Kids these days,” Reiner said loudly. At that point they made it outside of the building, and all arguments became moot as they were forced to remember that it was, in fact, not dark out.

            “Every time,” Jean said, “ _every single_ time I think it’s going to be night , holy fuck…”

            While everyone else was groaning and squinting in the sunlight, Ymir got her bearings.

            “If we wait a bit we could go to a bar,” she said. “My aunt works at one—she’ll let us in.”

            “I, uh—I don’t know,” Connie said. “My mom’s already on my case for working at my uncle’s place, you know? She thinks I spend half my time in a drunken stupor as it is. I’d like to not get arrested and trash my future.”

            It seemed like as good a moment as any. If Armin waited until they’d decided on a destination, this would be more awkward.

            “I’m really tired after yesterday,” he said, and ignored the obligatory catcalls from the rest of the group. Mikasa’s eyes widened.

            “If you pulled a muscle you should have said—”

            That wouldn't do anything to drag the rest of the group's mind out of the gutter, but much more important than what the rest of the group was thinking was what Eren was going to do. The last thing Armin needed was Eren insisting on walking him home. 

            “No, I didn’t, it’s just—you know, the normal lactic acid situation, especially since I hadn’t used most of these muscles in a while…” 

            He petered off with a squeak. They continued to stare at each other for a moment until they arrived at an understanding.

            “You should rest, then,” Mikasa said, allowing her eyes to return to their natural shape.

            “Yeah. So I’m just—going to go,” Armin said. He withdrew his hand from Eren’s. “You have fun, though.”

            “I’m going too,” Mikasa said.

            “You can’t _both_ go,” Jean said. “I thought Eren was like the highest and most important thing to both of you—” The combined glare from Armin and Mikasa was more than enough to vaporize the stream of words. “Right. Okay. You want a ride back?”

            “We can take the bus,” Armin said. “Your car isn’t even here.”       

            “Right. No. Of course not.” Mikasa and Armin exchanged a glance but said nothing about it. They said their goodbyes to their friends and then started toward the bus stop, but found that they weren’t quite left alone. Reiner and Bertl went with them. At first Armin thought it was a nice if entirely unnecessary gesture, since this journey would take them all of twenty metres away from the rest of the group. Then he saw that Reiner was wearing not his jocular trouble-making expression, but his stern, captainish one.

            “I heard the three of you were out practicing yesterday,” Reiner said once they’d come to a halt by the bus stop sign. “And by ‘heard,’ I mean Jean drove past and then asked me whether we were starting practice. So I told him yeah, we are.”

            “Isn’t it early?”, Armin asked.

            “I thought so, but if you’re going to be practicing you might as well do it with the defensive line—and I can’t run defensive practices if I’m going to let the offensive line slack. So. Wednesday, it’s looking like; I’ve called Levi and Hange already.” Armin suppressed a groan. At least without the coaches it still might have felt like a semi-private affair rather than an official start to the season. He wasn’t ready to have all of them out there smirking at him.

            “It’ll be fine,” Bertl said, maybe having sensed Armin’s unease on their shared anxiety wavelength. “We just need to get used to having you back. Marco too.”

            _Thank the stars for Marco_ , Armin thought, releasing his breath. Of course it was going to be alright, especially if Reiner sectioned them off into defense and offence. It would just be Reiner, Bertl, Marco, and maybe the midfields—but with the midfields came Jean, who was the opposite of intimidating. The real threat was not the team but the coach, but if they split up, that wouldn't be a problem. Levi had himself been a striker, so he’d undoubtedly take the forwards. Hange would be loud and unabashedly critical, but you could always tell that they meant well.

            “Right,” Armin said, managing a smile.

            “Tuesday’s probably the start for your team,” Reiner said to Mikasa, who nodded. “Any changes to your lineup?”

            “Nobody new signed up,” Mikasa said. “Nobody dropped out.”

            “Alright; see you Saturday for joint practice, then. And Armin. Wednesday. Give us the best damn strategies that head can think up.” He ruffled up Armin’s hair with one huge hand, and then he and Bertl walked off to join the rest of the group. The others were still milling about at the curb when Armin and Mikasa’s bus came. Once they boarded Armin glanced out the window and found that Sasha had one of Eren’s hands, Historia had the other, and that they were tugging him persistently along the sidewalk.

            “It looks like they thought of someplace to go,” Armin said as the bus lurched forward with much rumbling and hacking from the engine. Public transit around here always seemed about one gasp short of its demise, and always smelled like urine. The bus was surprisingly uncrowded for six o’clock on a Saturday, but the man across from Armin and Mikasa was managing to make the space feel awfully crowded—just staring at one or both of the highschoolers. 

            “Yes,” Mikasa said, after glaring at the man with full murderous ferocity for long enough that he looked away. The glance she turned on Armin was infinitely warmer. “I asked them to keep him occupied for a while. Did you get what you need?” Armin nodded.

            “Do you want to do it at my house or yours?”

            “Mine. That way we won’t disturb your grandfather.”

            “Alright. We’ll just stop off, then, to pick up the ingredients. Did you get him anything else?”

            “He asked for a puppy. Several times.”

            “Was he joking?”

            “I couldn’t tell.”

            “Did you get him one…?” She gave him a look normally reserved for Eren—that is, one dripping with exasperation. “Good. I can’t see that working in a dorm. What did you get him, then?” He was twisting up the fabric of his jacket sleeve. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten it was Eren’s birthday. He just had not been able to think of some great transcendent present to give him. 

            “A knife,” Mikasa loudly. “Want to see it?” She reached for her pocket. There was a ding, and a few moments later the bus swayed to a juddering halt. The man across from them scurried out without a glance back. Mikasa snarled under her breath, and then drew from her pocket—to Armin’s surprise—an actual knife. It was a pocket knife with a smooth, shiny handle, and thick enough to accommodate at least a few interesting devices as well as the blade itself.

            “Why that?”, Armin asked, though privately he hoped she put it away before anyone else on the bus started screaming about murder and anarchy and teenagers.

            “I’ve had one for a while. It’s useful. Also sometimes for self-defence.” The bus had started moving again, but she cast a venomous glance out the window as if she could still see the man who’d been leering at them. “I just thought he should have one too.”

            It made Armin’s present look rather thoughtless and bland—he’d gotten it at a convenience store—but Armin tried not to think about that. Eren wouldn’t compare them.

            That did remind him, though, that his and Mikasa’s main present was probably going to be a catastrophe.

            “Were you serious about the pancakes being practice?”, he asked. Mikasa looked at him sidelong.

            “They’re called pancakes.”

            “But they’re sort of different…”

            “Taller.”

            “That means there’s a whole different chemical reaction, though.”

            “We could stack them.”

            “And ice that. It’d probably work out better than an actual cake, anyway…”

 

 

            Eren's initial sinking feeling when he'd been dragged into this was starting to dissipate. They'd been wandering for a long time now, and he was certain at this point that there was no actual humiliating destination in mind. Everyone seemed to be _looking_ for one, of course, but so far the best they'd turned up was to force Eren into a convenience store to buy lottery tickets. 

             Without a direction in mind, the others' enthusiasm was winding down. The group was becoming less and less cohesive as some of them carried on ahead and others lingered at shopfronts to tell some joke to a friend. Annie seemed to be enraptured with her phone in a way that was quite familiar to Eren from all his time around Mikasa.

 

            The text that had just arrived on Annie’s phone actually read:

 

**This is a disaster. It looks like it’s alive. It’s not even in the oven yet.**

**Y bother then ill send kirschstein back so u can go pick up one from the store or smth.**

**We have to make it ourselves. Him and Armin made one for me in February.**

**Yeahh how’d that turn out.**

**We’ll do better.**

**Do u want me 2 help.**

**It’s alright. We need you to keep him out of here.**

**Thanks Annie.**

**Xoxoxoxo**

            Annie had first started ending text conversations that way ironically because it made Bertl nervous and that made Annie laugh, but anymore she wasn’t as sure that she was doing it to be difficult. The tension between the probability of sarcasm and the possibility of sincerity made her spine tingle in the most embarrassing fashion imaginable. It felt good.

 

 

            The cake was on the counter, round and perfect and in two identical layers. The air was thick with the smell of vanilla and spices. The kitchen was still warm with the oven’s heat. And Armin Arlert was having a meltdown.

            “I don’t know why it’s not working!”, he said. His hand was starting to slip on the handle of the wooden spoon with which he was desperately, hopelessly stirring what appeared to be beige gravel. It was meant to have been icing. “We followed the instructions—”

            “I think it’s about timing,” Mikasa said as she leaned over the saucepan. This did not look salvageable. It really was a shame. They could have gone for something simpler, since Armin already at least had some experience making a more basic sort of frosting for Mikasa’s birthday. The more ambitious attempt had been Mikasa’s idea. Carla had made spice cake with this particular kind of icing a grand total of once, for Grisha’s birthday years ago. Mikasa was about ninety three percent certain that it was the first time Eren had (consciously) fallen in love. Unfortunately, it appeared that if you heated the icing for too long it turned into so much sugary debris. There was no use trying to save it. 

            She caught both of Armin’s wrists. They went slack under herhands, so it was easy to pull him away from the stove. His neck was quite limp, and he looked like he was either going to cry or faint in the very near future. If he did she had no idea what she was going to do, so she rubbed at the backs of his wrists with both her thumbs in what she hoped was an encouraging way.

            Just as she opened her mouth to reassure him, her phone—left on the counter amidst spoons and measuring cups and one ancient candy thermometer—beeped. Under normal circumstances she would have dealt with Armin first, but since all her friends were currently occupied with distracting Eren, there really was only one reason she should be receiving a text. The sender was, naturally, Annie.

 

**Hes getting all antsy. I don’t think itll be long now ok.**

 

**Hes walking back to kirschsteins and going to get a ride. Jean said hed screw up the navigation and stop for gas so uve got a bit of time I guess.**

**Hows that cake coming.**

**The cake is fine. The icing didn't work out.**

**I think Armin's going to cry if Eren sees it like this.**

**Ok well obvs dont let that happen then what a mess.**

            This solved a long-running problem they’d had. When Mikasa went over to Annie’s apartment, one thing they often did was play on her dusty old video game console. Frequently the games required rescuing some princess, or protecting her, and there had been a lot of tumult about which one of them exactly was the defendee and which was the adventurer. Mikasa glanced over her shoulder. Armin was red in the face from standing over the stove so long; he was massaging his temples and muttering to himself about thermodynamics, as if he could reason the icing into the proper consistency by means of Newton’s laws.

            There were worse princes to protect, even if Eren was in this case the dragon (accidentally or not). 

            “He’s on his way back,” she said as she set her phone on the counter. She scooped up his hands again and laced her fingers between his, like she and Eren and Eren and Armin had done as children. Her voice was even and calm and soothing. “We have as long as Jean can stall him. Is that enough time to try again, or do we scrap the cake?”

            Armin had still been a bit glassy-eyed from contemplating the failure currently sitting on the stove, but he blinked now and looked much better.

            “Jean's dependable; he'll get us a lot of time. We should be able to try it again,” he said. “We still definitely have enough ingredients. And he’ll be able to smell the cake. It would be bad if we didn’t have one to give him. I don’t know if it’s any more likely to work the second time around, though.”

            “Is this the best chance we have?” Armin nodded. “Then we’re going to try.”

 

            “Really—I’ve definitely got to get home,” Eren said, to general opprobrium. Reiner and Ymir actually booed. They’d just been wandering along any stretch of sidewalk that looked halfway inviting, and had somehow wound up blocks-deep in a residential area with most of its streetlights burnt out. Eren had no idea where the hell they were, but if he was going to go tearing around recklessly after dark he wanted it to be with Armin and Mikasa too, damn it.

            “He’s not going to be fun to have around anyway once he gets all irritable,” Annie said as she discreetly slid her phone into her hoodie pocket. “We might as well let him go.”

            “We should,” Historia said, and then she pulled Eren down by his collar so she could kiss his cheek. “Happy birthday, Eren.”

            “Thanks,” Eren said, and was promptly dragged away from her for an absolutely crushing hug with Reiner and Bertl. “Why all the affection all of a sudden—?”, he managed to ask, despite that he felt certain his lungs had just been flattened.

            “One-time deal only,” Connie said, steadying Eren by the elbow when he stumbled out of his hug with Reiner and Bertl. He then shoved Eren along the sidewalk. “Get going—got to be good and well-rested, or whatever, if we’re starting practice this week.”

            Eren huffed a bit, but he was smiling.

            “Be careful walking home!”, Sasha called. “Don’t get arrested!”

            “Don’t overdose on sugar before Wednesday’s practice!”, Reiner roared.

            Eren waved one arm in acknowledgement but didn’t turn back around. The only member of the group still before him was Jean, who was leaning against a telephone pole with his arms crossed and his shoulders hunched up. Marco had gone home some time ago, which meant Eren was going to have to contend with Jean by himself.

            “You know I can walk home, right?”, Eren said as Jean fell into step with him. The other boy was loping along with his hands shoved in his coat pockets.

            “My house isn’t even far, and you’ll get home faster this way than if you wander around in the dark like you’re new. Quit whingeing. I’m supposed to be nice to you for your birthday, and you’re not making it easy.”

            “You just paid for me to have to walk home carrying all this shit,” Eren said, lifting the bag. It was full of every bit of ridiculous miscellanea his friends had been able to buy in the last convenience store they'd hit. “That’s not ‘nice.’”

            “Only part of it. You would’ve done it too if you’d had Reiner holding your game-time hostage. It's not like I'm the one who decided you needed like twelve cans of tuna. That's most of your problem there. Maybe give it to Armin for protein or whatever.”

            “Shut up.”   

            “Nah.”

            “Actually, about Armin—”

            “No, no, stop right there. This isn't advice hour with Jean,” Jean said.

            “No, give me a second here—”

            Jean all but leapt to the far edge of the sidewalk.

            “ _No thanks_ —”

            “For fuck’s sake, Jean, you could actually be useful here!”

            Jean eyed the bag Eren was carrying as if suspicious he was about to be clubbed across the head with it. If anyone could turn tunafish and candy into a murder weapon it was Eren. 

            “Fine,” he said, judging it not worth the risk. Eren looked earnest, anyway, and Jean wasn’t so crabby he was going to be deliberately unhelpful. “What do you want?”

            “How’d you ask him out? Not Armin.”

            “I got that, jackass. I asked Marco out by pre-drinking before he picked me up for Historia’s party. I was too sloshed to be scared.”

            Eren frowned. That was never going to work with Armin. Eren had never seen him really intoxicated, and it gave him the half-formed belief that Armin disapproved of or was uncomfortable around overwhelming drunkenness.

            “Why’re you asking me, anyway?”, Jean asked. He was scratching at the rough hair of his undercut for an excuse for something to do. “Mikasa’s there.”

            “Annie asked _her._ And Annie scares the hell out of me, so no.”

            “Ymir, then. You two have a lot of awful personality traits in common, plus Armin and Historia are both tiny and blonde and intimidating as all hell. You could really have a moment.”

            “I asked her already, and she tried to bullshit me. Like, now I'm pretty much convinced Historia did the asking.” Eren scowled away into the distance. “Mikasa said you and me are sort of similar, anyway, so it made sense to ask.”

            “Ew.”

            “I know.”

            “You’ve got to just sort it out yourself then, if my expert advice isn’t doing it for you. It’s probably best that way anyway. Armin’s not Marco, so even if you were _hypothetically_ similar to me _in any way_ it probably wouldn’t work out the same . Not that you’d want it to. You’ve got to play to your own strengths here. There’s no point even doing it if you’re pretending to be somebody else, because for one thing Armin’s going to see straight through that, and for another it’ll just be a pain in the ass trying to maintain that standard of quality.”

            “You mean the drunk, slurring standard.”

            Jean shrugged.

            “I set the bar low. Might not be such a good idea, in the end. Just—be straight with him, and— _not straight like that, stop snickering—_ and, fuck, Jaeger, you're the direct-and-to-the-point sort, so just _ask_ him. It's not like he's going to die of shock. You two have your own special creepy plane of communication you're on anyway, so just do what seems right to you, and for him.”

            "Yeah. Alright, thanks."

            "And do it before you're living with the guy, alright? It's going to get awkward as hell if he meets some nerd kid in his super-science class and falls for him, and then has no choice but to look at your ugly pining face every day. Sort this shit out in a  _timely, responsible manner_. No more overdramatic stunts like last winter, either."

            Eren shifted his mouth to one side.

            "I asked for some advice, not a lecture." 

            "It's a special two-for-one birthday deal." 

 

            “Where were you?”, Mikasa asked the moment Eren stepped out of Jean’s car. How she’d known to be waiting at the curb for them, Eren had no guess and no remaining patience to find out. It was his birthday (or close enough), and he’d been having fun, and he didn’t think he should be reprimanded for that.

            “Don’t get pissed at _me_ —you wanted to go home early, and it was everyone else’s idea. Yell at Jean about it. Or Ymir. Or Connie. Hell, yell at Annie if you want.” He stomped along to the house. Mikasa leaned down towards Jean’s window.

            “Where?”

            “Kind of nowhere and everywhere,” Jean said, with one of those twitchy, awkward grins. "We didn't have our master strategist with us, you know?" 

            Mikasa let out a long breath through her nose and then straightened up.

            “Hey, wait.” Jean was leaning out the window. “Were you and Armin serious when you said you’d give us cupcakes as bribe money?”

            “That depends on if the cake turned out.”

            “Did it?”

            “We won’t know until Eren eats it. Thank you for stalling him.”

            She marched back up to the house at double pace and caught Eren while he was still taking off his shoes. The handle of a shopping bag was dangling loosely from Eren’s wrist. Mikasa hooked one finger under one edge of the bag, pulled it open, and looked inside.

            “Wonderful taste.”

            "Yeah. Blame our damn friends. Or yourself. I mean, hell, you guys could've been there to supervise if you hadn't bailed for no reason." On second thought, he wasn't sure that would have turned out any better for him. "Anyway, I'm going to go to b—"

            "Really?" 

            Eren simultaneously looked up and clutched the bag to his chest. Armin was standing in the kitchen doorway, with his hair messily pulled back, his face red, and Carla’s floral blue apron knotted neatly behind his waist and neck. There was flour smeared across his cheek and down his whole front. He was tired and embarrassed and sweaty and _absolutely gorgeous_ , and Eren would take this sight in exchange for the next five years’ worth of birthdays.

            Eren’s daze was so syrupy and pleasant that he actually let Armin lift the bag from his arms and look inside.

            "That's...really something, Eren. Fish, and the worst candy in the world, and...is that a box of condoms?"

            " _What?_ " Eren leaned over to look. "I _knew it—_ Ymir had this look on her face like she was so fucking pleased with herself for something, but I didn't see her actually—I mean, this's not—not for use, or anything, you know—?"

             Armin looked anything but scandalized.

            "I'm not...afraid of contraceptives? I know a joke present when I see one. I don’t really know where the whole embarrassing people on their birthday thing started...” He poked around inside the bag for a moment. It didn’t look like anyone had spent too much money; he was glad. It had all been for diversion’s sake, and he didn’t feel that what he and Mikasa had wound up producing was worth any of their friends' money at all.

            “Armin and I did something more traditional for you,” Mikasa said. Armin’s shoulders shot upwards. If his hair hadn't been tied back, he was nearly certain it would have stood on end. 

            “Um, wait, though, it’s not really—”

            “It’s as ready as it’s going to get.”

            “Then maybe we should just start from scratch.”

            Eren was moving already towards the kitchen doorway. Armin dropped the bag with a heavy clunk and tried to block his path, but when Eren reached him he quite simply lowered his shoulder, placed it against Armin’s sternum, and slid him backwards. In his socked feet, Armin couldn’t find enough traction on the smooth floor. It would have been easiest to simply duck out of his path, but Armin was bound and determined that Eren was not going to have this cake.

            “Which way am I looking, Mikasa?”

            “On the counter, beside the microwave.”

            “ _Mikasaaaa_ ,” Armin said. He was digging his heels in, but the floor was too slippery and he weighed too little. In a moment of frenzy he tried what seemed to be the only remaining alternative. He jumped up so that his arms were around Eren’s neck, his legs were around Eren’s waist, and his face was pressed against Eren’s neck.

            Looking back, he wasn’t sure why he had thought this would work. Maybe he’d been hoping it would just distract Eren sufficiently to stop him from finding the cake.

            “Oof—oh my god Armin—” Eren staggered for a moment but then continued on as if he hadn’t just acquired a backwards, living backpack. “You’re not as heavy as you seem to think, you know.” He trudged across the rest of the kitchen and found his birthday cake right where Mikasa had promised. “Holy—is that—whatever it’s called?” He craned around to look at Mikasa, who was still standing in the doorway.

            “Penuche. Yes,” she said. “It was more difficult than we thought.” Eren tipped forward precariously, resting his hands on the counter so that he could get a closer look at the cake. Armin squeaked a bit as their centre of gravity shifted, and tightened his grip. The surprise of this nearly sent Eren face-first into the cake.

            “Don’t get too overenthusiastic,” Mikasa said. “Dinner’s first.”

            “Did you guys really try to cook?”

            “We didn’t have time,” Armin said into his chest. He felt a bit like a cat hanging from a tree, but without the years of experience and raw instinct for it. “We ordered out.”

            “What did you get?”

            “…What do we always have on birthdays?”

            The doorbell rang. Mikasa went to answer it while Eren muttered something under his breath about the timing being suspicious.

            “You can get down, you know,” he added, for Armin’s benefit. Armin unwound his legs from around Eren and placed his feet on the floor, but this still left him bending awkwardly backwards with his arms around Eren’s neck. At least this way he was freer to move back a little to see Eren’s face.

            “Does it look alright?”, Armin asked. He knew the cake had been iced sloppily. He and Mikasa had still been working on it when Mikasa had judged Eren’s arrival to be imminent and gone out to wait. Armin had been left to finish it off, and he was anything but artistic.

            Eren frowned at him.

            “Armin, it’s a cake. It _looks_ like I’m going to stuff it all in my face at once.”

            “I don’t think Mikasa would let you do that.”

            The young woman herself arrived in the doorway; Eren spun around to see what she’d brought and found her holding three pizza boxes.

            “Three extra-larges,” she said. “One meat-lovers’, one of those messes that you like, one veggie. It’s important to balance your diet.” For someone who liked to get experimental in the worst ways with the pizza toppings on offer, Eren was so easy to please. He ran to Mikasa, grabbed the pizzas, and then ran right up to the second floor, all with this ridiculous expression of very happy, but very determined, focus.

            “I…” Armin said. It had been some time since he’d had dinner at the Jaegers’ house, but he could honestly say that he didn’t remember ever having a meal upstairs.

            Mikasa was already reaching for the nearest cupboard. “I’ll get plates and cutlery. You carry the cake.”

            “But where are we going?”

            “I’m not really sure.”

            When they went upstairs they found no sign of Eren except for the fluttering curtains in Mikasa’s bedroom and the three pizza boxes being edged over the windowsill. Mikasa strode across the room and dropped both elbows onto them, wedging the boxes against the sill before Eren could quite make his getaway.

            “Why the garage?”, she asked.

            “More fun,” Eren said from somewhere below Armin’s line of sight. “Now let go—I’m going to lose my balance.” Mikasa did so, and the pizza disappeared to join its owner on the garage roof.

            “You go next,” Mikasa said to Armin, who looked down at the cake with deep unhappiness. Dissatisfied though he was with the thing (looking at it now he could see a few places near the bottom where the icing hadn’t quite reached), he wasn’t looking forward to watching it disappear into the abyss of mulch and weeds at between the garage and the house. “I’ll hold it until you’re out there.” She set her own cargo aside on her desk and held her arms out for the cake. With some reluctance Armin passed it over, and then manoeuvred himself into the tiny square of the window. He’d just turned himself around and was about to start reaching his feet back in search of the lip of the roof when he was caught around the waist and pulled, steadily, backwards out of the window.

            “Um—”

            “Take this,” Mikasa said, pushing the cake into his hands.

            “Mikasa we’re not really steady—”

            “We’re fine,” Eren said.

            “You’re standing on a slope—no Mikasa don’t let go of it—”

            But she did. Armin managed to hang onto the cake, and Eren managed to hang onto Armin long enough to lower him so that his feet were soundly on the shingles. He was slow to release Armin, who was contemplating how much stronger Eren’s arms were than they’d used to be, and how loudly Eren’s heart was hammering against his back.

            “You smell like cake,” Eren said after giving a little snort of laughter that stirred Armin's hair against his neck.

            “I...think that makes sense. I’m holding a cake.”

            “I wasn’t complaining.” Eren’s arms dropped away from around Armin’s waist, and Armin turned to face him. Eren immediately set about fiddling with the hem of Armin’s shirt, which had ridden up slightly during transport. “Mikasa, you coming or what?”

            “I’ll be out in a minute.”

            “Fine, fine. C’mon, Armin—I put the pizza down just over here a bit.” He hooked one arm under Armin’s, as the latter’s hands were both busy holding the cake, and startedup the slope and away from the house. There was a ridge along the roof’s centre, about a foot wide, that was more or less flat. Eren trotted right up to it and the balanced pizzas as if this were nothing, and without much consideration for the fact that if Armin tripped they were both going to wind up cake-covered at best, and rolling right off the roof at worst. Eren did manage to guide them safely to the peak, at which point he took the cake from Armin and then sat down carelessly next to the pizza. The sun was long since down, but Eren’s grin shone through that.

            _Hell, Eren, you have such an amazing face,_ Armin thought as he sat next to him.

            “You were right. This was a good idea,” he said. He leaned back on his arms and lifted his chin so that the wind could curl beneath it. It was cool, but not as cold as yesterday—and after the hot, enclosed stuffiness of the kitchen, the change was more than welcome. “It doesn’t even smell like we’re two blocks over from a garbage dump for fish and chemical waste today… It smells like pizza.”

            Eren snorted as he set the cake carefully on the flat of the roof and flipped up the lid of the first pizza box.

            “Ahh, _yes_ , looks like she got it exactly right.” Armin leaned so that he could peer over Eren’s shoulder and into the box.

            “That…that looks..." _L_ _ike everything that’s wrong with the universe, actually.”_ Eren somehow managed to siphon one of the slices out of the box despite that it looked like some kind of particularly chunky liquid. He held it out towards Armin.

            “Don’t complain before you’ve even tried it.”

            Armin leaned back slightly.

            “I was there when Mikasa ordered it. I know this involves barbeque sauce and anchovies.” Those were just two of the toppings, too. The pizza was a whirlwind of all of the worst combinations Armin could imagine. He wasn’t sure he could support something like that, on a moral level.

            “Just try. I swear it’ll be the best pizza you ever have.” When the corners of Armin’s mouth tugged downwards, Eren held the slice closer still and said, “C’mon, Armin—don’t you trust me?”

 

            While Armin engaged in the most questionable pizza experience of his young life, Mikasa was leaving her phone behind in her room. That most recent conversation had left her not much wanting contact with the outside world, for the moment.

            She and Annie hadn’t fought. Annie hadn’t said anything wrong. Mikasa just had something to settle, and it involved only the two boys making faces at each other out there on that roof.

            As soon as she’d read the first text, Mikasa had known this was not going to be a conversation she would like.

 

**Maybe don’t mention Marco 2 Jean for a while btw.**

            Annie typically could not be bothered to intervene in the social affairs of others. She could hardly even be bothered to intervene in her _own_. If she’d taken the pains to actually contact Mikasa about someone else’s relationship, there must have been something wrong.

 

**Why not.**

**I think theyre fighting.**

**Marco says its about school or smth.**

**Like jeans all upset theyre not going to the same one.**

**I mean what did he want right itd be bullshit to go to the school just 4 someone else.**

**Yeah.**

**Anyway just a heads up since u three and kirschstein r sort of close I guess.**

**No 1 wants to see his stupid ass getting in a fight with eren bc eren’s not in the loop.**

 

            Even with plates and cutlery in hand, Mikasa vaulted out the window and onto the garage roof with casual ease. From there she paced up to the peak, came to a sudden halt immediately before the boys, and said, “Eren. Armin. Do me a favour, please.” She wished her footing was as firm as it looked. Any moment now she felt she could go tumbling right down the incline.

            Armin nodded. He thought, _Anything_ , but didn’t have time to say it aloud before Mikasa continued. “Don’t tell me what university you decide to go to.”

            “Wh—what the fuck? Why not?”, Eren snapped.

            “Because I haven’t picked yet. And I want to. Myself. Everyone has been saying, ‘It’s good you’re not following Annie,’ ‘It would be silly to choose your school based on where you girlfriend is going,’ and…maybe they’re right. But it applies to the two of you also. So don’t tell me.”

            The staring commenced. Armin had honestly never expected this. He’d always thought he would be the one bailing on the other two, leaving Mikasa standing stalwart at Eren’s side. He’d considered himself the weakest corner in this whole triangle.

            _But if it’s Mikasa doing this, it can’t be weak…_ A step away from Eren was, for Mikasa, a step away from home and shelter and safety. It was a step away from _family_. After losing one of those so bloodily and unexpectedly, she knew how important it was more than most. There was no way in hell she was doing this lightly. Her expression was nearly blank, but her shoulders formed a perfect line, and her hands were tight at her sides. Her gaze was bolted to Eren’s.

            “Alright,” Armin said, and just hoped with everything he had that Eren wasn’t going to deny her this when it must have taken so much for her to ask. Eren was silent a moment longer before his mouth twitched into a smile.

            “Yeah, okay,” he said. “C’mon though. We’ve got to get going on this—if we don’t eat the pizza I can’t try the cake. I mean, you scraped up some ancient recipe to make this icing. I can’t let that go to waste.”

            Mikasa plopped down between Eren and Armin—clumsier than usual, as if she’d forgotten the proportions of her own body. She reached across Eren, dragged the already open pizza box forward onto Eren’s lap, and then threw open the lid of the second box. This revealed what was to Armin’s mind a much more respectable pizza—though, if pressed he would have had to admit that Eren’s bizarre pizza, for all its drippiness, was actually halfway decent.

            “You keep that one,” she muttered. “Nobody else wants it.”

            “Yeah,” Eren said, “fine, you stick to your veggie pizza. _Mom._ ”

            “That’s a compliment, Eren.”

            “She’s sort of right,” Armin said. Eren squinted at him.

            “I bet you’d get real cranky real quick if I called _you_ that.”

            “That’s because you’re not supposed to date your mom.”

            “Well I’m not dating you.”

            “That’s true.”

            “I wouldn’t have gone there,” Mikasa said, almost inaudibly.

            “It’s fine,” Armin said. “I don’t mind.” She passed him another piece of pizza.

            The silence stretched out for minutes. At first Armin thought it was because Eren was angry with Mikasa, or Mikasa was anxious about Eren, or something along that vein; but the line of Mikasa’s shoulders was softening, and though Eren looked more thoughtful than a person chewing a face full of pizza usually did, he wasn’t glaring lightningbolts like he sometimes did. It was a comfortable quiet. Even the occasional car passing on the street was just an unobtrusive rush, like the sound of distant water. If the wind hadn’t been so bracingly cool, Armin thought they probably would have fallen asleep up there eventually.

            As it was, Mikasa was alert enough to remember that they had hauled a cake up there with them, and that it would be a shame if they didn’t eat it. When nobody seemed to be in a rush anymore to get at the pizza, she passed the knife she’d brought to Eren.

            “You go first,” she said. “Don’t eat the whole thing at once.”

            The slice Eren cut himself was nothing short of monstrous, but it was smaller than Armin had expected in that it did not consist of half the cake. Once it was mounded on top of one of the plates, Eren looked expectantly at the other two.

            “You should start first,” Armin said. “We forgot candles, so…you might as well just go.”

            Eren did so with enthusiasm. Once his mouth was properly full he said something that was lost to the cake, but he got his message across by finding a grip on Mikasa’s shoulder and shaking the hell out of it.  

            “The icing was difficult,” Mikasa said while this was still going on. “You should thank Armin for being willing to try it again.”

            “The failed prototype’s still in the kitchen,” Armin said.

            “Eren will probably still eat it.”

            “It looks horrible though.”

            “I don’t think he’ll care.”

            When Eren resurfaced from the cake, gasping, he said, “Guys, try it. Seriously. That is the best cake I have ever had in my life.”

            Armin and Mikasa blushed in unison.

            Once the other two had each finished off a piece for themselves, Mikasa stood up, stretched, and said, “I have physics homework to finish for tomorrow. Don’t stay up too late. Mom said they’d be back early tomorrow.” With that, she scooped up the plates and marched back over to her window.

            For those first few moments of peace before a new conversation could start up, Armin considered reassuring Eren that Mikasa was going to be fine if she went to a different school from them, and that anyway there was a one in three chance they’d all wind up going to the same place . He thought better of it. Last winter’s events aside, Eren wasn’t generally the sort to keep any worries or anxieties quiet. He’d yell about it when he felt like yelling about it, if he did. Instead Armin leaned over and retrieved one of the remaining slices of Eren’s pizza, which Mikasa had refused to touch.

            “It’s pretty good, actually,” he said quietly.

            “Told you.” Eren sounded fine—loose, casual, quite normal. Maybe a little more tranquil than was common. 

            “So did you like it? Your birthday?”

            “It hasn’t really happened yet. But today was good, yeah. I’ll admit I was kind of frustrated you and Mikasa left, but it makes sense now, and I got a cake out of the deal, so yeah. Pretty great day, all told.”

            “It’s not that late. It doesn’t have to be over yet.”

            “What, you want to go out and evade the law again? We could walk downtown, pretend to be drunk, and pick a fight with a cruiser if you want.”

            “No thank you,” Armin said, with a bit of real firmness in his tone, just in case Eren wasn’t joking.

            “Alright, alright. Boring it is, then.” A pause dropped in unexpectedly. “ _That_ one was a joke.”

            “I’ll keep that in mind.”

            Eren scooted over to fill the gap Mikasa had left.

            “We can think of something to do," he said. "Could watch a movie.”

            “If you want to.”

            “Ssssssssstudy.”

            “On your birthday?”

            “Go for a run.”

            “It’s sort of late for that.”

            “You could rip the hell out of my art project.”

            “I…wouldn’t do that…?”

            “That way it'd have a critique before I hand it in."

            "I don't know anything about art, though."

            This time the silence lasted for a few beats before Eren offered another suggestion. 

            "I could walk you home.”

            Armin looked up at him, totally innocent of the knowledge that doing so with such clear, wide eyes while sitting so close to Eren nearly sent the taller boy careening into the stratosphere with elation.

            “Don’t, though,” Armin said. “It’s not _that_ late.”

            Eren's face burned in the best way. 

            “Then let's get rid of the damned hair tie so you don’t end up with a headache,” he muttered, and pulled it out himself. With all his years of practice, he managed to do this without yanking any of Armin’s hair. Then, once he had the elastic sitting in his palm: “Oh my god, it’s pink.”

            “Do you have a problem with pink?” Eren pulled his hand back. His fingers had curled up protectively, like the object was a baby bird in his palm and not an inanimate elastic. 

            “Fuck no. You look good in pink.” He picked up Armin’s hand so that he could stretch the elastic around it and then push it back, onto Armin’s wrist. “You look good in anything. I just mean, you’re going for maximum attractive today, apparently.” He started on the knot that fastened the apron behind Armin’s waist. “I mean, I don’t figure that was deliberate.”

            “No.” Armin had no idea what Eren found attractive, and even if he had, he didn’t have much means to follow through. His wardrobe was limited to whatever was cheap when he was out looking, and whatever he thought was fairly low-key and unlikely to get him mocked. If he was feeling particularly daring he might wear a shirt with one stripe across the chest.

            The apron was pulled off over Armin’s head and set on top of the nearest pizza box.

            “That’s what I thought. So I guess it’s just my good luck.”

            Eren lay on his stomach with his arms folded on the high point of the roof and his head tilted towards Armin. After a minute or two of being cajoled and finally requested, Armin laid down next to him, facing skyward. It took Armin a few minutes to get comfortable like that, and to stop thinking about the chance that he might slip. The shingles were rough and helped keep him anchored, and the slope wasn’t too steep. That aside, Eren was there. Embarrassing though it was, he’d always catch Armin if he fell.

            And Eren was awfully, noticeably close right now, looking intently at Armin over the curve of his own bicep. Eren smelled a bit like popcorn, a bit like soap, a bit like sweat. Sometimes there’d be the layer of grass and dirt, and if he’d gotten off work there was always the oil from the fryers. He’d learned during their middle school years that there was such thing as overusing the aftershaves and body sprays that seemed to miraculously appear in the lives of twelve year olds everywhere. One day Mikasa had hauled him aside and asked him on behalf of everyone’s physical and mental health, and in the interests of decreasing his own flammability, to lay off a little. It had cut that phase mercifully short and left the world’s air that much clearer. Eren now smelled, for the most part, like Eren. It wasn't always a good thing, but it was always familiar, at least. 

            “So Mikasa might be leaving,” Eren said suddenly, just as Armin was about to shut his eyes.

            “M-maybe," Armin said, and winced at the stumble. "I’m sure we’ll still see her all the time. None of the schools we applied to are far away.”

            “Right. But what about you?”

            “I’m still going to pick with you. All three options are just as good for what I need, so we’ll just narrow it down for you.”

            “But what are you going to _do_?”

            “After?”

            “Yeah.”

            Armin sighed and tipped his head back onto the flat of the roof.

            “I don’t know. When I was little I wanted to do everything. Now it's just whatever will work, I guess.”

            “Why not this?” Eren waved a hand upwards. He’d seen the way Armin’s eyes had been tracing the constellations.

            “Clouds?”

            “Stars and stuff. You could do that. You’ve got all those posters. You could probably name me every constellation we can see up there, and then start on the southern hemisphere.”

            “That really doesn’t make me qualified… What about you?”

            “I don’t know—I want poli sci classes but I also kind of want the basic history, sociology type stuff, and I’m going to need law probably, and I sort of wanted to take a film course? Because some of the ladies at the gallery were saying that’s a super popular protest medium lately, and—yeah. English maybe. I might need to write stuff. Things like that. Anything that’ll help me tear this place down, you know? I’ll work it out as I go.” He propped himself up on his elbows. “You know I’m going to do it, right?” Armin’s gaze slid across to meet Eren’s. He nodded once, without breaking the eye contact, so Eren could see that he meant it. “Great—that’s—I feel way better about that now, haha.” He leaned over a little and dropped his head closer to Armin’s. “So, tonight—Do you want to stay? You can. You can sleep on the couch, if you want.”

            “Are your parents going to have a problem with it if I do?”

            “I don’t think so. They know Mikasa’s dating Annie, and—my mom basically told me to go ask you out last term. She doesn’t exactly have any illusions that I’m straight.”

            “I meant, is Grisha going to make faces at me when I leave for making his morning awkward?”

            “Oh. Maybe. If you want you can sneak out Mikasa’s window before they get home.”

            “I heard that,” Mikasa called from her open window.

            “Well is it alright?”, Eren asked.

            “It’s fine. So long as it’s not too early.” Her window closed. When Eren turned back to Armin, smiling triumphantly, Armin said:

            “Now, how am I supposed to do that from the couch?”

            “…I guess it’d be easier from my bed.”

            “Well in _that_ case…”

            Eren frowned, which really had been the opposite of Armin’s intention.

            “I don’t mean it like that. Shit. That's exactly why I was going to just not sleep in your bed on  _your_ birthday, you know."

            “Eren, it’s fine. I’m really anything but scared of you. Then where’s the problem? If you want me to sleep on the couch I’m happy to do that, but if you’re just worried about _me_ here... I'm fine. I like being close to you, including physically.” He leaned up and kissed Eren’s temple. “Okay?”

            “My room’s kind of a disaster area. So be ready for that." Then he perked right up. "Oh, and you can wear something of mine if you want.”

            “I brought pyjamas.”

            Eren blinked.

            “Are you serious?”

            “After how my birthday went…? There were pretty good odds it was going to end up like this. I grabbed them when I picked up the ingredients and your—oh. Your present.”

            Eren flung himself backwards, and when Armin sat up he found Eren sitting about a foot down the slope of the roof, looking as if Armin had just promised him he’d make a personal gift of the entire solar system.

            “You mean the cake wasn’t the present?”, Eren asked.

            “Not all of it. I got you—”

            “Don’t tell me!”

            “I didn’t have time to wrap it after work anyway. It’s literally just c—”

            “No!”

            Armin gave up.

            “I’ll give it to you when we go inside, then,” he said.

            “There’s no huge rush,” Eren said, flopping back down again on the shingles as if that could be anything approaching comfortable. “C’mon, tell me about this star stuff.”

            “What about it?”

            “Anything you want.”

            “You know it’s not going to be constellations like it was when we were kids... It turns out that’s a really basic way of looking at the stars—it’s mostly just useful for navigation and mythology and things like that. People see what they want to see.”

            “So what?”, Eren said. “Let me see what _you_ want to see, then. Tell me anything you know about them—anything you think’s interesting.”

            For a moment Armin stayed just where he was, doing a mental run-through of everything he knew about astronomy in search of anything that might pass for interesting. It was all Doppler effects and dark energy, galactic recycling, quasars—not the sort of thing Eren would care about, since it wasn’t the sort of thing he could run his fingers over or see right before him or affect.

            And yet there he was with his eyes trained upwards and flitting from star to star in anticipation, like Armin might quiz him on where to find a particular one. 

            “Do you want to know how stars form?”, Armin asked.

            “Hell yes!”, Eren said. If there was one thing Eren _really_ could not fake, it was enthusiasm. He lifted one arm slightly so that there was space there to lie down. Armin settled against Eren’s side like it was as natural as gravity. No shifting or squirming was retired, this time, to get comfortable.

            “So,” Armin said, “have I ever told you about nebulae before?”

            “No.”

            “They’re these huge, huge clouds of dust and gas, out there in space—”

            “How huge?”

            Armin could feel his mouth bending in an involuntary smile. Never in his life had he gotten to explain any sort of theoretical concept to Eren without a question or request for clarification or some other interjection punctuating most of his sentences. He couldn't really have asked for a better sign that Eren was interested. 

            “Well…you know how large the sun is? Not in specifics, but just—”

            “It’s supposed to be fucking massive, right?”

            “Right. It can hold more than a million of the planet Earth—”

            “Holy fuck—”

            “—and it’s not even a large star at all. And _nebulae_ —well, they’re where stars are formed, and not just one at a time…”

 

 

            “Eren, Mikasa! We’re back!”

            It was the first sound Armin heard that morning, but it was followed immediately by a whisper by his ear: “Hey, Armin! Fuck. I forgot to set my alarm—”

            “What…?”

            He didn’t have the energy to open his eyes, especially when there was this warmth draped over him. If Eren was this close to him, he didn’t think they could be in any very serious danger.

            “My parents are home. Oh god, you’re so sleepy, hhaa, this is terrible. You always seemed like a morning person. I thought it was a fluke last time…”

            “Need a shower,” Armin mumbled into the mattress. “’m never awake ‘til I’ve had a shower…” The bed was warm without being overpoweringly hot, and Eren was lying over him and dotting his face with lazy kisses. If this was his sleeping situation, then being awake seemed extremely overrated. There was really nothing at all he disliked about this whole scenario except the sound of Carla and Grisha Jaeger moving about downstairs, but that could be ignored easily enough.

            Any urgency Eren had had upon first waking up was by now eclipsed by a sort of happy sleepiness. It was difficult to work up any sort of energy or motivation when he had Armin here beneath his arm, wearing an oversized t-shirt and pyjama bottoms with little cartoonish owls on them. Before they’d gone to sleep the night before, while he’d been gleefully sorting through the mountain of candy Armin had given him for his birthday, Eren had been quite distracted by the owls. He’d spent a lot of time tracing his fingers over the outlines of the ones on Armin’s knees. At first it had been out of curiosity about whether the texture was any different, and then because Armin started to get that same slow smile and tangible sense of presence he got when Eren played with his hair. It was rare to find Armin looking as if he was entirely there, and not skipping over star systems half the galaxy away or planning out next year’s course selections or fretting about how many shifts he could pick up at work that week.  

            Anything that planted Armin directly and unambiguously in front of Eren was going to win a high place on Eren’s list of favourite things.

            “So don’t wake up,” he said. “You could stay. Just stay. It’s fine…”

            Armin’s eyes opened just enough to be able to see past his eyelashes. Eren’s room didn’t face the same way his did, so he couldn’t gauge by the angle of the sunlight what time it was and how late they’d slept. There weren't many broad, flat planes in the room where the sunlight could comfortably pool. The place really was a mess, scattered with paper, binders, discarded clothing, soccer gear, candy wrappers, DVD cases. His desk, however, was immaculate, with all the textbooks and binders from this term neatly arranged, and pencils set along the side. Calling it a desk was perhaps generous. It was a plank nailed on top of two stubby bookcases, just like the ones in Armin's and Mikasa's rooms. They’d made them during a brief flirtation with carpentry in sixth grade. The three of them had all sat out in the Jaegers’ driveway one afternoon after a neighbour’s yardsale. They'd been armed with a hammer and nails and made these haggard, wobbly contraptions they called desks. 

_They’re so hideous_ , Armin thought with a fuzzy glow of joy deep in his stomach. He was halfway asleep when Grisha called: “We brought breakfast!”

            “It’s fine,” Eren said, rolling over even further so that his hands could fold together beneath Armin’s stomach on the mattress. “It’s my birthday. I can sleep in.”

            "Eren, you're heavy,” Armin grumbled. “You should go eat breakfast.”

            “Fuck breakfast,” Eren said.

            In one sense this was an unfortunate choice of words; in another, it was a good thing he’d put it that way. It reminded Armin of something.

            “Is that bag of presents still down there?”

            “Oh shit—”

            Eren vaulted gracelessly out of bed, trailing the sheet behind him and almost dragging Armin onto the floor. He tossed Armin his jeans on his way to the dresser and then scrambled for his own clothes.

            “It’s just going to look _really bad_ if they find all that _and_ you’re here,” Eren whispered apologetically as he yanked off his shirt and clawed his way into another one. To avoid adding his own part to the cacophony Eren was making as he stumbled around the room, Armin just nodded and pulled his pants on over his pyjamas while still on the mattress.

            “My shoes,” he whispered once he was more fully clothed.

            “Fuck—forget it, they probably haven’t noticed them yet and I’ll just hide them first chance I get—”

            Armin decided that there wasn’t time to complain about walking home in his socks. Eren grabbed him by the wrist and hauled him off the bed and into the hallway.

            “Coming mom!”, Eren called down the stairs as he opened the door to Mikasa’s room. “Hey, Mikasa, breakfast’s happening,” he said, with exaggerated loudness in an attempt to disguise Armin’s footsteps as he moved across her room.

            “Sorry, sorry,” Armin mouthed at her as he passed. She just waved a hand in his general direction as she got out of bed.

            Armin got himself out the window and along the garage roof easily enough, and without any of the neighbours spotting him and raising a racket. The problem arose when he hopped down onto the fence. He thought that the issue would be the rattling clang that rose when his feet met the metal, or that he’d impale his heel on the wire, but that really was the least of his worries. The hem of Armin’s jeans snagged on a piece of wire at the top of the fence. His reflexes were good enough to bring both hands up so that, when he inevitably toppled, he didn’t smack his face off the neighbour’s bristly grey-green lawn and break his neck.

            “Armin, holy shit!”

            There went any chance of discretion. He supposed there’d been no real hope of it anyway. Eren Jaeger wasn't notorious for his subtlety.  

            While Eren was still hanging out the window, Mikasa must have been making for the front door. She was out there with Armin within moments of Eren’s shout.

            “Are you alright?”, she asked as she unhooked his jeans from the jagged spike of wire.     

            “I’m fine,” he said.

            “Did you twist your ankle?”

            “Not badly.”  

            “Eren, is something going on?”, Armin heard Grisha ask from within the house.

            “Yeah, Armin just kind of came over and fell on his face, hold on—” Bare feet slapped on the pavement a few times, and then Eren and Mikasa were both hauling Armin to his feet. He was hardly standing before Eren was brushing grass and dirt from Armin’s shirt. 

          “Armin, you can stay for breakfast,” Carla said from the doorstep once the three of them rounded the garage.

            “Ahh, really it’s okay—”

            “It’s Eren’s birthday!”

            Armin could feel the sideways glances from both Eren and Mikasa. They weren’t helping. He tried to pass off the nervous laugh as something more like the sheepishness of a forgetful friend.

            “…Is it?”

            “Yes—so come in. He’ll be happy to have you over.” This was said with a sharp glance at Eren, as if there was any real risk that Eren would protest. Then her gaze dropped to Armin’s shirt, the stomach and shoulder of which were soaked through with mud.

            “Eren, go get him a shirt first. He’ll catch a cold.”

            “It’s really fine,” Armin said. “I should—I should get going anyway—”

            “At least have some food first. Have you eaten breakfast yet? Eren told me about how hard you were pushing yourself this winter.”

            The glare Armin sent Eren’s way put a dent in Eren’s celebratory spirit, but it didn’t last long. Armin acquiesced to the demands that he stay for the meal, due to his lack of a sufficient excuse and a means to defend himself from Carla’s statement that, ‘You’re family anyway, Armin.’ This meant that Eren did wind up going to find Armin a clean shirt. He naturally dragged Armin right with him. He’d dug through most of the contents of his dresser and made even more of a mess of his floor than usual before Armin started to question his motives. There was a pile of clothing mounting at his feet, and he was certain at least three of those shirts would have fit him.

            “Eren, there are a dozen perfectly good shirts there—”

            Armin said Eren’s name a lot, and these past few weeks Eren had started keeping an unofficial count. It wasn’t that unusual, of course. Mikasa did it too, and Carla, and anyone with half a mind to scold him, as if he flinched in the face of his own name. But he didn’t flinch. He liked hearing it, the way Armin said it, which admittedly was often with a little exaggerated huff.

            “Yeah, but look.” He finally straightened up, prize in hand, and tossed it at Armin. It was dark blue, long-sleeved, and cut wide across the shoulders.

            “Look at what?”, Armin said. Typically he just threw on something clean before class. He’d never had that much interest in what exactly he was wearing. To him this was just a shirt, or possibly the archetypal transcendent Shirt, in the Platonic way of thinking.

            “It’d look good on you.”

            Tactically, it was easiest to just go along with it. Armin shrugged out of his own shirt and then pulled Eren’s on. He was slighter than Eren, so it was a little large around the shoulders and middle, and the sleeves covered most of his palms, but he’d made do with worse.

            “Alright,” he said. “We should get b…”

            Eren was biting his lip, which meant he was hesitating about doing something. This in turn meant this situation had gone very strange indeed. His gaze was trained directly on Armin’s collarbone, which Armin thought was odd given that Eren just stood there perfectly normally while Armin changed his shirt.

            “What?”, Armin asked, looking down to see whether the shirt was stained. By the time he did, he found Eren’s fingers hovering over his chest, the tips of them near enough to Armin’s skin to raise goosebumps.

            “Can I…?”, Eren asked. 

            “Why not?”

            Eren stooped, and the curve of his neck was _extremely important_ all of a sudden. At least, it was until Eren's lips met Armin’s collarbone. That point of contact instantly became the only thing Armin was aware of, the only certain point Armin's mind could fix itself to. 

            _Oh. Oh._ In the same movement Armin tripped back a step and brought his arms up around Eren’s head to steady both of them. From where Eren started, five kisses brought him up along Armin’s neck and to his mouth. It was the sort of kiss Armin had been expecting from Eren from the start—the sort that was too messy and frenetic to linger just over his mouth, and that involved too much spit and the realization that his teeth were right in the way.

            When he pulled away again, it was clear done exactly what he’d intended to do; he was satisfied with it, too, given his smile. 

            "You liked it?", Eren asked. "That kind of kissing, it's alright?"

            Armin knew what was coming next. It would be assurances that it was fine if it wasn't, and that it didn't have to go any farther than that even if Armin  _did_ like it, and every scrap of comfort and acceptance imaginable. Armin's mind raced past these certainties so he could address his response. He was going to stammer out some statement that yes, yes that was better than alright, though he'd like it if they could explore this new plateau in and of itself, because after all what was wrong with just doing that  _all the time_ and also holding hands and bumping noses and eating terrible pizza and sleeping beside one another and playing with each other's hair—

            Armin's chest heaved once, like he'd only just discovered how to breathe after more than seventeen years of gasping. At that point Armin knew, but it was on an instinctual frequency he wasn’t used to monitoring. He didn’t even realize yet that he  _should_  be monitoring it.

            In any case, there was an interruption in the form of Carla's voice. 

            “ _Eren Jaeger what is all this_ —”

            “Oh shit,” Eren said, cringing bodily.

            “You didn’t get around to hiding that?”, Armin asked as his former line of thought became more of a spiral and wound its way out of immediate relevance.

            “I thought you’d just broken your neck! It was get yelled at by my mom or leave you out dead in the driveway! Now—want to go out the window again?”

            “Not really. That would look worse.”

            “Right. So then—”

            “We’ll just tell her the truth,” Armin said.

            Eren’s brow creased.

            “About you or about why I wound up with that birthday present?”

            “About where you went and why. I’ll tell her it was my idea to keep you out of the house while we baked the cake. I don’t think it’d clarify anything to tell her we’re wandering around between friendship and dating.”

            “Got it.” Eren started for the door and then stopped so suddenly that Armin walked into his back. “Only, would you be pissed if I ended up saying something about that too?”

            “No, just—go, before she gets angrier—”

            Armin wound up having to push Eren down each and every step, for the most part because Eren kept asking questions like, “What word do you think I’d use for our relationship?”, and “I mean are you my boyfriend at this point?” It was easier to push than to answer, so Armin pushed.

            In the end, Carla gave up her lecture once she'd made her point about  _just taking your time, Eren, honestly, you don't have to rush just because you're eighteen._  It was difficult to be really frustrated with him on his birthday, especially when he was sitting there with a ridiculous grin on his face which he directed Armin’s way every few seconds. Besides, she reasoned, he was eighteen years old now. Surely he could handle himself now to some extent. When he couldn't, he could turn to her, or to Armin and Mikasa. He was going to be fine. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaaaand again this devolves into directionless fluff. I do know where it's going; this part just took up about twice as much space as it was supposed to, because I was enjoying myself or something.


	4. Chapter 4

            “Kinda small, isn’t he?”

            Armin didn’t look over, but his fingers did lose purchase for a moment on his laces. They were just finishing warmups and were getting ready to take to the field for their first game of the season. The knot in the laces of his left cleat had been slipping, so he’d lingered at the bench a moment longer than most of his peers. They were mostly gathered near the sidelines while Levi and Hange outlined some gameplan or another. Armin didn’t need to review any of the strategies. He’d helped come up with most of them.

            That meant he was left within earshot of the opposing team’s bench. Their jerseys were a livid shade of red, blaring against Armin's peripheral vision; white text spelled out 'SCIVS', for Stohess Collegiate Institute and Vocational School. They'd been a rival of Armin's school, the ever-infamous Zhiganshina Secondary School, the whole time he'd attended; but only insofar as neither had a particularly strong boys' team. They always tended to squabble out their aggression and then sputter out before the spring tournament. 

            “Did you watch during their warmup? He can’t hardly shoot,” said another of Stohess's players. Armin finished off the knot and got to his feet, but he was so preoccupied that he nearly walked right into Connie. The forward was scowling in the direction of the other team’s bench.  

            “Whoa, that one too.”

            “Yeah, but he looks like he could bite a finger off or something, at least. The other one's just here to get stepped on.”

            “Hey, Armin,” Connie said, more loudly than was natural, “Hange says we should take the huddle a bit farther this way—you know, so they don’t hear us.”

            Silence from the Stohess bench. Connie grabbed Armin's wrist and pulled him closer to their own team; Armin went uncomplainingly. His mind was already working.

            “Great way to start a game,” Connie muttered. “Who even does that? What position d’you think they are?”

            “Midfields, probably,” Armin said. In their district the midfields tended to be tall and long-legged, and these boys fit the description.

            “Well hey, great. That puts them right within range for both of us. You get them going one way, I’ll get ‘em going the other?”

            “They’re going to think their size is an advantage,” Armin said.

            “So we’ll show them they’re wrong.”

            “Don’t try to kick it past them. You’re quick. Keep the ball at your feet, and if you run into trouble, cross it to Eren.”

            “Right.” 

            Armin wasn’t all that worried about the situation. If this had been a middle school hallway, maybe his hands would have been shaking more, and maybe he would have been firing back a retort. Maybe he would have said something that would have got his head slammed against a locker. He didn’t have to bother here. Those boys would get their response soon enough.

            “This shouldn’t be hard,” Levi was saying, at the centre of the circle Zhiganshina's team had formed. “They’re not a good team. Just don’t fuck it up and it’s a cakewalk.”

            There was an ill-unified chorus of ‘Yeah’ and ‘Alright,’ and the players took to the field. Armin found his place, meticulously centred in front of the goal line where Bertl was tugging on his gloves. They’d had four practices already, so although it felt strange for Armin to be out there again with Marco and Reiner ranging to his left and his right, he was comfortable. His heart beat a little faster than normal, sure—his fingers were a little numb, maybe—but the sky was clear, the wind was weak, and the temperature was cool. The ground was even nearly solid beneath his cleats. He couldn’t have asked for better conditions for his return to the field.

             _Which means there aren't any excuses_. Armin's jersey, with the large and slightly-peeling number six slapped across its back, sat easily on his shoulders all the same. It didn't itch like it had used to. 

            “Ready, Armin?”, Marco asked as the referee blew her whistle and started the game. The other team had won the coin toss, so they started with possession. Armin nodded, but he kept his eyes on the ball. That was his job—to analyze play and keep the defence coordinated, to find out where the other team’s offence was weak. If he could determine anything about their opposing defence, he could relay it to the others at halftime, or to Jean or the other midfields as the game progressed. That was, of course, if Jean and Marco were on better terms than they had been lately. It was possible they'd have trouble coordinating. 

            Just as Armin was thinking this, Jean swooped in from Armin’s right and swiped the ball away from the other team’s forwards as if it had been left unattended. They'd barely even passed the halfway line. Marco hadn't so much as twitched forward to stop the charging forward; he'd trusted his counterpart from up the field. Whatever was happening with the pair of them, it was manageable. 

            _And number three’s footwork is weak_ , Armin thought. A glance showed that Stohess's bench was full; there was no shortage of players, so if the boy's footwork was not his strength, he must have had a good kick. If he was their opponent’s left forward, it meant he would have to contend with Marco. It was a reasonably good match, since Marco’s own feet were fairly quick, and Armin was if nothing else good at predicting where he needed to be to intercept any long passes or shots. They should be able to stop him whether he kept the ball or shot it forward. Armin’s intervention shouldn’t be required over there, especially with Jean up there as a sort of defensive vanguard. Since Reiner was far and away the strongest player on the boys’ team, Armin decided that in terms of flanks, they were more or less sorted. The real problem would be his own territory down the centre of the field.

            That was before the Stohess midfields started up. It was a good twenty minutes before their team had a real opportunity. They managed to sneak the ball from Connie when he was on his way to what should have been an easy goal. The ball was swept across the pitch, to the right side. Armin had been correct; the two boys who had found him and Connie so unimpressive were the two right midfields. 

            Play was still centred near the Stohess goal, but Armin felt the momentum shift just as tangibly as he would have felt the wind turn. They would have to be ready.

            “Marco,” Armin said. “Go back and wait. Stay on number three, if you can. He’ll be coming up.”

            “Are you sure?”

            Armin hesitated over it for a second longer than he should have. The ball was coming up Marco’s side of the field. If Marco fell back, Armin would be responsible for stopping it. Armin was banking on the midfielder passing it to his corresponding forward, but the position Marco had just sent Marco to precluded that option. It was going to be Armin versus someone a foot taller than him. Reiner would have to try to cover his own half of the field; he wouldn’t be able to help.

            He nodded. The midfielder looked no more competent than his forward did. His feet clunked awkwardly around the ball, and he was big, but not prodigiously fast. All Armin had to do was keep pressure on him, and this breakaway should end with a corner kick at worst. Getting Marco tangled up with this adversary would only lead to problems when the forwards ran past him.

            Armin at least had the advantage of watching the midfield race up the field and around Jean and the others; he had a working knowledge of how his opponent moved the ball around. When he drew near to Armin he didn’t even glance at the small blond boy. The midfielder hurtled right past him with all the force of a train, but Armin had been expecting it. He turned so fast that his ankle twisted in his shoe, but it didn’t matter. Maybe he could do it himself, if he could just move his feet fast enough—he was keeping up—

            Sparks of light blipped across Armin’s mind’s eye. It was just as well, since for a moment his actual eyes weren’t sending him any information whatsoever. Everything was red and black and formless. He stumbled to his knees.

            “ _WHAT THE FUCK—_ ”

            Well, his ears were working, anyway. They were, for some reason, not reporting the whistle for a foul. Armin had just taken an elbow directly to the face; blood was streaming down his chin from his nose. The referee, still trotting forward to follow he play, must not have seen it.

            _Alright, alright_ , Armin thought, bringing his gaze up from the grass. _The ball’s still in play. Go stop it_. If he couldn’t maybe the other team would score. Certainly Eren would knock the front teeth out of the offending midfield, or of the referee. Armin wiped the blood on the back of his wrist and then launched himself after the midfield. Two forwards were already past him, spreading out wide to receive a pass. Marco was marking one of them, as Armin had advised him to; Reiner wasn’t in Armin’s field of view.

            All he had to do was get there. He could do that. After all those practicing sessions with Eren and Mikasa, he could do at least that much. Marco was covering the first forward to have darted up the field, and Armin thought he midfielder was more likely to just charge straight through for a goal than wait for someone else to pass to. All Armin really had to do was take a straight line towards his own goal—though admittedly, he had to do it much faster than he normally would have thought possible.

            But he did it. When Armin caught up he essentially tripped over the ball, which skewed its course just enough that the midfield had to pause. All the momentum he’d gained was ruined.

            More importantly, Reiner came charging through like some heroic lion. He absolutely ploughed the ball up the field. It went so far that Armin was certain it was going to go right out and there would be a goal kick, but Eren managed to snag it. The game was, for the moment, out of the defense’s hands. 

            “Ahh—Armin, your nose—”, Marco said.

            “I know. It’s alright,” Armin said. He was even smiling a little. Not because of the coppery pain and the lingering red behind his eyes. That was no fun at all, actually. But this was the first real play he’d made since last year, and it had been successful.

            “No,” Reiner said. They were now all three standing at about the centre of the border of the eighteen yard box.

            “Shouldn’t someone still be defending…?” Admittedly the ball was nowhere near them, but Armin was uneasy when he wasn’t able to watch and move appropriately.

            “They’ve got it,” Reiner said with a glance in the forwards’ direction. “Tilt your head back for a moment so we can see.” Armin did so. "How’s it feel?” Armin pinched the bridge of his nose to preempt Marco or Reiner from trying it. 

            “Solid…”

            “Alright. We’ll assume it’s not broken, then.” Reiner nudged him in the ribs with his elbow. “Good play. Hope you’re ready to do it again.”

            “Not if I can help it.” Armin wiped his nose again. “I think I understand them better now, though. We’ll be fine. They’re not going to score.”

            “No, but maybe we should give Bertl a chance to show off a little.”

 

            Eren knew better than to go tearing over there to see if Armin was alright. The boy had seen much worse than that over his middle school years, and anyway he was a particularly small defenceman left to handle the big swathe of field in the middle. This was not the first breakaway he'd foiled or the first attacker he'd irritated. Play often got rough for him. This was the usual fare, and he’d only get angry if Eren went over there to check on him.

            That did not mean, however, that Eren could not deal with these midfielders on his own half of the field. His initial attack had ended with a corner kick, which Connie took. The next few times Eren got the ball he deliberately mangled passes, but the first several times, his fellow forwards somehow salvaged them. Eventually, one was so bad that it was intercepted. He finally had an excuse to chase the offending midfield down. If his elbow happened to drive into the side of the taller boy, just below his ribs, and knock both of them hard onto the ground to concentrate his full weight onto the bony joint—well, that was inevitable, wasn’t it? He didn't try to disguise it. 

            The whistle shrieked. Free kick to the other team. As he picked himself up Eren spat on the field, and did not offer a hand to the boy whose face he’d just driven into the dirt. 

            “You don’t think that was maybe overkill?”, Connie asked. He was tugging on Eren’s jersey with the semblance of steadying him. More likely he was doing it to pull Eren away from the Stohess players.

            “What are you doing over here? You’re the opposite wing.”

            “I was going to argue with the ref if she carded you.”

            “Oh.”

            “Oh _shit_ ,” Connie corrected him, and nodded towards the sidelines. Levi’s expression looked particularly dark, and as Franz came out onto the field from the sidelines he was making unmistakeably for Eren’s position. Really Eren should have been off the field before Franz stepped onto it, but nobody paid much mind to it at this level. “Good luck. And don’t worry; I’ll kick their asses for you.”

            “For Armin too.”

            “Pretty sure Armin’s going to kick their asses for Armin.”  

            “Yeah.” Eren went off the pitch at what he hoped was a suitably respectful jog, though he would have much rather stomped the whole distance.

            “It’s pure luck that you didn’t get carded for that,” Levi said once Eren neared the bench. Eren nodded. “Not going to talk back?” Eren shook his head, partially because his teeth were clenched so tightly he could have been convinced that they’d fused together. Levi continued staring listlessly at him for a moment before he looked out again at the field. “Good. You were a much mouthier little brat at the start.”

            Deeming this a dismissal, Eren stumped to the bench. The others, all in the younger grades, stayed shuffled over to the opposite side, so he was free to throw himself down with full petulance and not fear catching anyone with a wayward elbow. He didn’t even go for a water bottle to give him some semblance of busyness or rationality. Electricity was still jolting down his arms, seizing his hands into fists. He looked at the grass between his cleats and thought about nebulae with the hope that it would calm him down. Big, cold clouds. Stars came from dust that had once been the part of other stars. Big, beautiful cold clouds that made Armin’s eyes shine.

            He breathed in through his nose and held it the way Mikasa had once suggested. She was over there on the bleachers now, glaring in either his or Levi’s general direction. Eren genuinely couldn’t tell from this distance. He liked to think she was on his side in this, but she might have thought he was being reckless. He was supposed to know better than to pick fights now, even on Armin’s behalf, or hers. 

            Before Eren released the air, Levi spoke.

            “Look at them play. What do you think?” Another shake of Eren’s head. He exhaled slowly and could only hope that his voice wasn’t going to come out in a snarl. He wasn't angry with Levi, and there was no point pretending to be. Pulling him off the field had been the right choice. Leaving him out there with a head full of nothing but reckless violence would have been unconscionable, both for Stohess and Zhiganshina. 

            “I don’t know.” Finally, he got a lucky break; he sounded human. “They’re rough.”

            “They’re rough because they’re clumsy. Our defense is too strong for them, so they get frustrated, and they foul. Juvenile little shits. As players they're not worth the detergent they wash their jerseys with.” A sideways glance. Utterly inscrutable as always. “They can’t make scoring chances even when they break our centre defenceman’s nose.”

            Eren’s gaze flickered out to the field again. Armin did still wipe his nose periodically to keep a stripe of red from streaking down his chin, but it was an automatic motion, and his eyes were always fixed on the play. Calculating where he had to be. Finding weak points. It didn't look like he was in much pain, or if he was, he wasn't paying much mind to it. Eren hoped to hell that Armin’s nose wasn’t broken. The thing was cute, damn it, and anyway if there had been damage on that level Eren was going to have an even harder time not taking a swipe at the other team.

            “So what does it mean?”, Levi prompted, in the pained tones of someone resisting the urge to turn their point into more of a blunt object and cuff their listener about the head and ears with it. “If they can’t score they can’t win. That’s not something we have to worry about. But if we can’t score we can’t either.”

            “Right.” Even now, the game was firmly centred near their opponents’ goal. Hange was standing some ways down the field, trying to help Connie wend his way through the opposing defense by throwing a lot of expressive wordless shouting his way. They were absurdly articulate before and after games and during halftime, but when play was in progress they always got swept away in the excitement of it.

            Eren was not permitted to do the same. Levi stepped between Eren and the field so that Eren had no choice but to look at him. The man was anything but large, but something about the way he held himself always made Eren sit or stand a bit straighter. Well, almost always. Eren had been slouched over until just now, but with Levi’s bored gaze drilling a hole in his forehead Eren remembered that, _Oh yeah, he intimidates the hell out of me_.

            “Jaeger. This goalie’s weak at blocking shots from his left side.” He paused as if to gauge whether Eren understood him. “That is _your_ side.” Eren nodded seriously. Four years of being coached by the man, and Eren still didn’t know how to tell when he was making a joke and when he was genuinely doubting his intelligence. “Springer knows it instinctively. It’s why you keep finding the ball at your feet. So _don’t pass it back to the centre just because you want to rough up the midfields_. You could have scored four times by now. Keep it low. The goalie’s afraid to slide for it. If you’ve got to vent, do it to the bottom of the net. Their offence is shit. Their defence isn’t much better. Keep the ball ahead of their midfields and there’ll be no reason for your boyfriend to get his face roughed up. Work with Kirschstein and maybe you’ll actually do the defense some real good.”

            “What do you…”

            Levi sighed briefly and then tilted his chin towards the bleachers.

            “The scouts are out shopping. It’s not like that was easy for us to get them interested in a dump of a school like this. I don’t like calling in favours for you brats if they’re going to be wasted. Give them a reason to stay interested. Don’t stop being pissed off—I’m not even sure if you’re capable of that. Just don’t waste it.”

            Eren brightened up immediately.  

            “When can I go back in?”

            “Next throw-in.” Eren shot to his feet. In reality he was waiting there at the sideline (bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet) for all of five minutes, but it felt like an age of the earth before he was charging over it and out to replace Franz. As he ran Eren turned his gaze skyward. He was being given a second chance; Levi had had no reason to give it to him. He could have spent the rest of the game on the bench, or stayed there even through the next game or two; instead he'd been given a channel for all the angry energy, which was all he'd really needed—

            “Eren, pay attention—!”

            He was startled back to earth. He could tell by Jean’s tone that he had the ball and was looking to pass it, and now Eren knew right where he had to go.

            Thirty seconds later, Eren drove the ball into the corner of the net. There was a scattering of applause from the bleachers. Mikasa, seated with her team, sent a nod Eren’s way. A glance at Levi, and Eren almost stopped running back to his position. For a moment, he would have sworn the coach had been smirking.

            He wondered whether the ‘mouthy’ comment was Levi’s way of being nostalgic. It had been Eren who’d convinced him and Hange to coach their team in the first place—Levi had been freshly retired from his own career with a leg injury, and Hange had been (and still was) an important part of the coaching staff at the next city’s university. They'd been icons, as far as Eren was concerned. Neither of them had ever coached at the high school level before. Maybe somewhere beneath all the scowling and muttered cursing about excitable brats, Levi was actually enjoying this.

 

            They wound up winning three to nothing—two goals for Eren, and one for Connie. Their defense had more than enough opportunity to shine. Even Bertl got to make a few plays, though Eren suspected the defense had deliberately let the ball past them so he could do so. When the last whistle was finally blown, an unwitting spectator might have thought this was the final game in a tournament, given all the screaming and cheering and tackle-hugging going on. Armin didn’t really know why all the fuss, unless it was that they’d started their season well, or were happy to just have all of them there again. Whatever the reason, as he was crushed together with most of the other boys he found himself smiling a bit too.

            His legs were going a bit bendy with exhaustion. After they shook hands with the opposing team, when Eren grabbed his wrist and hauled him over to a clear spot between the bleachers, the most Armin could do was register a few vague protests.

            “I just want to get a look before it all gets washed off,” Eren said. "I want to see how bad it is, you know?" It had started raining lightly towards the end of the second half. Armin lifted his free hand to cover his nose.

            “You mean there’s still blood?”

            “A bit, yeah.”

            “Why do we have to go over here to do this?”

            “So you don’t get flustered. I don’t know. Do you want me getting all in your face while Levi’s watching?”

            “No.”

            “So here we are.” They’d found a nice patch of mud to stand on; Eren stopped and turned to face Armin. His squinting gaze scrutinized Armin’s nose and then trailed away down his chin.

            “Alright. Doesn’t look too bad, I guess.” He picked up Armin’s hands and smeared one of the stripes of blood with his thumb.

            “Holy fuck—your face only looks alright because all the blood’s here. He got you pretty good, huh?”

            “It was a solid hit,” Armin said. “It’s fine, though.”

            “I know. You kicked his ass before he made it to the goal.”

            Armin made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a huff. He tilted his face downward to hide the pink spreading across his cheeks.

            “Reiner did.”                 

            “Is it broken?”

            “No.” Eren placed one finger at the tip of Armin’s nose and pushed. “Ow.” Armin’s nose scrunched up, and it was so cute it wasn’t fair—so cute Eren almost forgot to feel guilty.

            Almost.

            “I thought it wasn’t broken,” he said.

            “It did recently get elbowed, though.”

            “Ahhhh, sorry.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Connie wanted me to tell you that if we meet these assholes at the tournament, you and him’ll team up to take them out.”

            “I’ll come up with something,” Armin said, nodding and looking very serious all of a sudden. “You have to stay out of it though.”

            “I will. Mikasa’s already probably going to give me a concussion for taking that one guy out…” Eren was peering over the nearest set of bleachers, where Mikasa and the rest of the girls’ team had been sitting, but no flinty gaze met his own. If she was still over there, he didn’t see her. He was distracted from searching by a familiar bright yellow umbrella bobbing over toward them.

            Armin spotted it the next moment; his eyes went wide, and he hurried out to the front of the bleachers only to slide almost immediately to a halt.

            “Grandpa! I didn’t know you were here!”

            “I thought I shouldn’t miss the first game,” his grandfather said, steadying Armin by the elbow and smiling at him. “These seasons are so short. Odds are I'll work through the rest of it. And I'm glad I came, now... I was thinking I might have to take you to the hospital, for a moment."

            "Oh—no, I'm really okay."

            "I know. You played well. You did too, Eren.”

            “Thanks,” Eren said, beaming. “It worked out pretty great, so everyone's all worked up." He turned to Armin. "Do you want to—uh.”

            Armin’s grandfather had never really been one for awkwardness. He looked mildly at Eren. His eyes were not quite the same colour as Armin's, and the skin around them was wrinkled and drooping, but there was something of Armin's frankness to be found there. It wasn't any sort of confrontational or hostile look, and not nearly as intense as the look so often in Eren's own expression, but it was intelligent and discerning and, given what Eren had nearly just asked Armin, a little terrifying.

            “Are you going somewhere after the game?”, Armin's grandfather asked. 

            It wasn’t that unusual, after all. Given the racket still rising from the direction of their bench, with the addition now of the most the girls’ team, there wasn’t much doubt that at least a few of them would be piling into booths in some greasy local restaurant.

            That had been more or less Eren’s idea, minus the crowd. He wasn’t sure what had come over him—especially with Armin’s grandfather standing right there. Probably it was just the rush of victory.

            “Nah, not really,” Eren said, “or anyway nobody’s really formally invited us—”

            “Jaeger!”, Jean called from near the sidelines. “Are you two coming or not?”

            “Well. I guess that’s that.” He looked at Armin.

            “I think I’ll walk him home,” Armin said.

            “You should spend time with your friends,” his grandfather said. “I made it here. I’ll manage to hobble my way back, somehow.”

            Eren laughed and then wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to.  

            “I’ll walk you to the gate, anyway,” Armin said. “You came all the way out here for me. It’s really the least I can do. Eren, I'll catch up. The rest of you can go.”

            His grandfather leaned on his arm as they made for the gate. Eren watched them go—the sagging form in itswoolly grey sweater leaning against the shorter one in its brown jersey. The latter was shorter, but straighter, steadier, with squared shoulders and a willing arm. Eren remembered seeing Armin’s grandfather carry the boy on his shoulders when he picked him up from kindergarten. He remembered the twinge of jealousy in his gut—Grisha had never carried him like that—and, more clearly, he remembered fighting it by convincing Armin to let Eren carry him around on his back the next day at recess. They'd toppled over almost immediately, and their beleaguered teacher had had to pull Eren aside for a second time and give him a very stern talk about picking on the smaller children. Of course, Armin had been waiting right behind her; once she'd been busy with some other playground problem, Armin had hopped up onto Eren's back himself and wondered aloud how fast Eren could run like this. 

            At the moment, in the lull before Armin came back (because hell if Eren was going to leave with the others), before Eren had to think about any problems or responsibilities or goals, he couldn't really think of a higher ambition than trying that again. 

  

            “ _KILL ‘EM MIKASA!_ ”, Eren roared from the highest point on the park’s bleachers. The rest of the boys’ team was clustered together in the first few rows, but Eren had been gradually ascending as the game went on, as if to help his voice carry. Armin had followed, mainly to make sure he didn’t actually jettison off of the bleachers in his excitement.

            They were nearing the midpoint of May now—the season-ending tournament was next weekend, and this was the last qualification game—but the weather hadn’t let up at all. It was absolutely pouring rain. There was hardly a player on the field who hadn’t lost their footing and slid, which meant there was hardly a player on the field who wasn’t coated in thick grey muck. The mud at least complemented the awful brown of the Zhiganshina's jerseys; Trost High's royal blue was looking considerably worse for wear. As a whole, the field looked like one of those blotchy, mute-coloured, semi-abstract landscape paintings. Everyone looked suitably miserable out there. They were long past half-time, and Mikasa’s team was scoreless against a team with three points.

            Mikasa, though dripping and frowning and with her hair falling out of its ponytail, had not yet taken a tumble across the pitch. She was always stalking about near the other team’s eighteen yard box, waiting for a pass to come her way, or darting in to intercept one for herself, but this team’s defence was the model of perfection. Armin had gone over to talk to Levi and Hange at half time, but even he hadn’t been able to spot many weaknesses for their forwards to exploit.

            But—just there, Sasha swooped in and snatched the ball from the midfields, and they could possibly generate some momentum from this—

            Armin’s fists had been pressing hard into his knees, and he’d been leaning so far forward on the bench he’d nearly been falling off—but Eren was in much more danger. As he followed the current of play he was hopping along the bleachers, steps made staccato with pure energy. When his shoe inevitably lost traction, Armin managed to get his arms between Eren’s shoulders and the metal. Eren quickly fought his way back upright and continued as if nothing had happened. Armin sighed a little and then dutifully followed. Eventually Eren came to the rail at the far side of the bleachers; he hopped up onto the first bar, leaned over, and said, “C’MON SASHA!”

            Maybe Armin would have pulled him down had Sasha not at that moment made a clean, absolutely _beautiful_ pass to Annie, who wound her way between the opposing defence, slanted towards the goal, and—

            Passed. Clear across, to Mikasa’s waiting right foot. For a moment even Eren—even _Hange_ —was silent. Everything was quiet enough that the solid _thump_ as Mikasa’s cleat connected with the ball was clearly, almost painfully audible. So was the gentle push of air as the ball, just a moment later, hit the back of the net.

            For the span of a breath, there was just a collective sigh from half the spectators, and a collective groan from the other half. Then Hange let out a whoop. Near the bottom of the bleachers, Connie sighed and slumped back onto his seat—managing not to fall right off through Jean’s and Marco’s efforts. Eren just relaxed all at once like he’d been hit with a tranquilizer dart. He fell back off the rail and managed somehow to end up sitting (if a bit messily) on the nearest bench. He leaned back on his arms and tilted his head back.     

            “They did it,” he said.

            “The game’s not over yet,” Armin said as he sat next to him. The bench was wet, but it didn't matter at this point. "They're still two points down."

            “Yeah. But they’re going to do it.”

            He was breathing heavily, like he’d been out there assisting in the goal himself.

            “You seem sort of…hyper, lately,” Armin said. He’d been meaning to just let it slide, since Eren seemed so utterly thrilled about everything, but it was getting alarming.

            Eren’s head snapped forward again. Armin had thought Eren might be spent after the relief of the goal, but his eyes were bright and focused as ever.  

            “Yeah, it’s great—I’m making progress, here.”

            “With what?”

            “Scholarships! I’ve applied for like a thousand of them. I remember you were saying you had to pick your battles, since you keep saying you won’t get the Sina scholarship—so I did too. I picked all of them.”

            Armin felt his mouth open but couldn't do anything about it. He would have sworn his brain made an audible ticking noise as he connected everything together.

            “So, all those times you’ve been at work—”

            “Community service! Historia got me a gig with the art gallery, doing art lessons for the little kids.” Historia’s paid internship with the gallery was, in her own words, the only good thing about still being on speaking terms with her family. “I mean it’s just really basic stuff, but it’s fun, and a lot of them are little shits but a lot of them are actually pretty awesome, and—it’s hours, you know? Being an ‘active member of the community’ is on so many of the scholarship forms, and I thought, hey, if nothing else I can do that. Plus I’ve been picking some up with the student council, just running posters for their can drives and bakesales and all that, and for a while there I was coaching our old elementary school’s basketball team—they didn’t do too well at the tournament, but it was fun—”

            Armin snapped his mouth shut with a click of his teeth, more in an attempt to salvage his dignity than anything.

            “When did you start doing all this?”, he asked.

            “January. I mean the art gallery stuff’s just been since the end of March, but I’ve got a ton of hours already. I figure it’ll at least give me _better_ odds of getting the community service scholarships, you know?”

            Given his competition, Eren was underestimating his chances. Their school was one of the least enthusiastic in the district about just about everything. Due to a slew of easier courses, Eren’s grades this term were higher than ever. He was certainly due for multiple scholarships, at this rate.

            But that was beside the point. 

            “How are you still alive?”

            Eren blinked, like he hadn’t been expecting the question.

            “I thought about everything you did for us last term, and I thought if you could do all that, I should do as much.”

            “Eren, this is _more_ —”

            “No it’s not. I don’t think it’d be physically possible for me to work more hours than you did, and I’m not in retail. Well, unless I’m at actual work. But they’ve usually got me in the back, so I’m not dealing with customers. And it’s not like my brain’s working while I do this.”

            “Don’t say things like that—”

            "Besides, Mikasa'd stop me if I was doing too much. She's not as polite about it with me as with you, you know."

            "But why didn't you tell me?"

            "Uh." Eren shrugged. "I didn't  _not_ tell you, as a policy. I started to once or twice. Then I figured you'd just worry, you know? But there's not anything to worry about, and I wasn't going to stop, so there wasn't any point unless you asked me about it."

            Armin scowled at him, but then... Eren if anything seemed  _more_ energetic lately. Not grey-faced and dull-eyed like Armin had been. And if Mikasa had been in on it, and had been monitoring his activities, he wouldn't have been getting away with nearly as much as Armin had last term. Maybe it was different. Not a product of pressure or stress, but of... Well. The word 'passion' embarrassed Armin, but maybe that was what fit best. Eren had sorted out what he needed to fight for and the best way to do it. He'd even found a better-than-passable strategy for it—going for the scholarships where his grades wouldn't impede him. Armin found it hard to be annoyed when he was so genuinely impressed. 

            “Holy shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit,” said someone from the direction of the rest of the boys’ team. Armin sat up straighter. All the players on the field were moving back to their positions.

            “Did Mikasa just score? Again? Oh—Eren, we need to be watching.”

            “You started it,” Eren said.

            But the girls’ team did not require their attention. Before the referee blew the final whistle, Annie and Sasha both scored, and assisted Mikasa to a hat trick. When the game was done everyone was too emotionally or physically exhausted for much celebration.

            It was just as well. After she shook hands with the other team, Mikasa was flagged down by a somewhat alarmingly brick-shamed, blond man with a broad umbrella. Her initial instinct was to ignore him and, when he followed her towards the bench, to give him one of her very coldest glares.

            “Ah, I’d heard about that,” the man said, catching up to her with his long strides. “This will only take a few moments—Levi asked me here personally. My name is Erwin Smith.” Mikasa finally stopped her progress towards the bench and gave the man more than a passing glance. All of a sudden she knew exactly who he was, or at least what he represented. His clothing wasn’t especially formal, but his hair was neat and his expression was clear and focused. This was a scout from a university.

            A man of similar expression—though scragglier than this one, inky-haired—had pulled Annie aside just a few dozen metres away.  Mikasa found it hard to concentrate all of a sudden, but she managed to catch the scout’s next words. “He said he had some players of interest, and you in particular.”

            While Erwin Smith relayed his message, Mikasa stood perfectly still and utterly expressionless; when he was finished he nodded; when he left she stood still long enough that the other man approached. Again she met his proposal with a blank look and a curt nod. When at last he stalked off the field, Mikasa and Annie were the only two people still out on the grass. The boy’s team had migrated down to the bench to talk to the girls. Levi and Hange were hanging back a little ways, watching their two star forwards.

            Mikasa didn’t notice. While her mind worked, her gaze automatically drifted to Annie, who must have slipped closer while Mikasa hadn’t been looking.

            “Well,” Annie said, and—hell, she was even smiling slightly. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

            "You passed to me," Mikasa said.

            "You just got offered two tickets out of here, and you'll get more at the tournament. Don't waste your time thinking about me." 

            Mikasa frowned a little and realized her heart was beating fast, like the game was still going and her team was down a point. 

            "How could that be a waste?"

            It was such a fleeting, quiet thing, but Mikasa could have sworn that Annie sighed. 

            "Come on," the shorter girl said, and started making for the bench. "There's a burger in your future. I'll pay." 

            Mikasa followed, but her head was swimming with numbers and promises and the memory of the solid, effortless pressure against the side of her cleat as she received a pass from the least expected direction. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just realized that I had never named the protagonists' school. Whoops.  
> Also I have nothing against Stohess, or Trost for that matter. I just...needed a name. 
> 
> And sorry for the wait (though it's not the first time...). Life's been sort of weird over the past few weeks, so it's been hard to find time to write even a relatively short chapter like this. Hopefully that'll ease up now, or at least soon!


	5. Chapter 5

            “So are you two dating yet?”, Sasha asked as she selected a dusty piece of chalk pastel from the box their group was sharing. There were supposed to be two people per table in art class, but Sasha and Connie had turned around to talk with Eren, Historia, and Ymir. The person who had started the semester next to Eren had switched out, which meant he couldn’t complain about the shortage of space as much as he might have. He  _could_ complain about the fact that image of the forest Sasha was working on was getting an awful lot of green dust all over Eren's work, but he didn't. 

            “Nah,” Eren said.

            “How the hell are you managing to not ask?”, Ymir said. “You’re not shy.”

            “Armin’s not either,” Connie said.

            “I’m trying to think of the right way to go about it, and he’s letting me, because he’s more patient than you assholes.”

            “What’d you do when you asked Historia out, Ymir?”, Sasha asked. 

            Eren and Historia sighed in unison.

            Ymir smirked.

            “I was a smooth fucker, is what.”

            “Do you mean you fucked smoothly, or you were smooth and also a fucker?”, Connie asked.

            “This really needs to stop,” Historia said, with the tone of the long-suffering. “I asked you. That’s how it happened. That’s always going to be how it happened."

            “If anyone but you said that I'd call it slander,” Ymir muttered, and went to wash the pastel dust off her hands.

            “What are you bunch doing?”, the teacher called from the front of the class—too engaged with her computer to actually investigate more personally. “Springer, Braus—back to your table.”

            Connie sighed and swiped his (quite brilliantly-rendered) skyscape off of Eren’s table so that he could turn back to face the front. Sasha did the same, but not before palming two of the only reasonable green pastels Eren had to work with.

            Eren just shook his head and focused on smearing red across his page. He didn’t really do figurative art. He said it was because he didn’t have the patience for it, but really he just thought colours were more fun to play with if they didn’t have to conform to particular shapes.

            “Why _haven’t_ you asked him, though?”, Historia asked quietly, in the lull before Ymir came back. “I don’t think it’s that you’re scared of what he’ll say.”

            Eren really didn’t feel that he should be answerable about this topic to anyone but Armin, but since it was Historia, he didn't mind so much. 

            “Uh, no. It’s not about what I think he’ll say. More about what I think _I’ll_ say.” She set down a perfectly smooth curl of grey across her drawing.

            “That is sort of strange, Eren. You know you get to decide what you say, don’t you?”

            “Have you met me? I tend to get carried away. Why do you care so much, anyway?”

            Historia tilted her head slightly to one side but did not lift her eyes from her work.

            “About you? I don’t know. You’re my friend.”

            “I mean about me dating Armin.”

            “I think it’s because you remind me a bit of Ymir, sometimes. Just a little. And I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t asked her. Having her...has helped, a lot. So I thought I’d give you a push. In the end I don’t really care if you kiss once and it’s over, or if you date for three weeks and end it, or if you have a seventy-year marriage. It just seems to be better when people are happy, and I thought you’d be happier if you asked him. If I’m wrong, don’t do it.”

            “It’s not that you’re wrong, at all—”

            “Aaaaaahhh.” Ymir leaned down between Eren and Historia so she could get a better look at the slate-grey lake Historia was creating. “I thought I was good with pastels, but you’ve been hording all the talent again. You know what—teach me! And I’ll show you how to paint. You know I'm good at it; this's a good deal for you.” When she leaned back again she tugged on Historia’s braid. Historia looked like she would have liked to be frustrated or irritated; the smile on her face was quite clearly an uninvited guest.  

            “Would the two of you stop screwing around back there?”, their teacher called, with resignation but not with real anger. Certainly not enough to launch her from her chair. Eren didn’t really feel that a reprimand was in order just because Ymir was leaning a bit close to Historia, so he looked forward and found the source of the teacher’s exasperation. Sasha was shaping some menacing eyebrows on Connie’s face with the green dust that had rubbed off on her hands.

            “You want a goatee or a full beard?”, she asked, as if she hadn’t heard their esteemed educator.

            “Full beard,” Connie said. “I might as well be distinguished for when I go out into society.”  Ymir groaned as she took her seat.

            “It's been months, and that joke wasn't funny the first time you said it.” Connie's next class, and Eren's, was formally called ‘Challenge and Change in Society,’ but nobody called it that anymore than they called the basic twelfth-grade math class ‘Functions and Relations.’

            At least Eren would be spared the class itself today. He had an appointment with one of the school guidance counselors. Everyone had them lately, so that the counselors could talk to them about grades and school selection and accepting a university’s offer. Eren was feeling pretty good about the whole thing, since he already _had_ accepted an offer. He and Armin had had a huge research session followed by what had been more or less a meeting to discuss their findings. The next morning, Armin had insisted that they each write down the school they’d chosen on a piece of paper, so that they couldn’t change it upon hearing what the other said—they could have talked about it after the fact, of course, since Armin was so sold on going to any of the three schools they’d applied to, but he'd wanted to be sure that they arrived at their initial choice honestly.

            That second discussion hadn’t turned out to be necessary. They’d both chosen the university the next city over; it was about an hour away, had the best labs in the region, employed a dozen noted social science professors, and was among the more open in the province to student protests. It also promised residence for all four years for students with high entrance averages, so if Eren and Armin couldn’t find a suitable apartment after first year, they’d be covered.

            Everything was going quite well, Eren thought.

 

            When Armin got a text just after the lunch bell, he knew something was wrong. He sat with his friends in the cafeteria; unless someone was sick or absent, there was really no reason they would have to contact him over the phone when he was already on his way to meet them.

            When Armin saw that the text was from Eren, even before he read it, his suspicions were confirmed. Eren typically sat within a foot of Armin at lunch, so there was _really_ no reason for this unless he was not where he was supposed to be.

 

**Hey could u get my math book for me**

**Just in my locker**

**Are you sick?**

**HAHhahahaha yeah sick of all the horseshit at school!!! Not u obv**

**Just u kno**

**Please?**

**Yeah, it’s not a problem.**

**Thnx**

**Also im not going to be in class obviously bc. Fuck class anyway**

**Alright. You can copy my notes. I can ask the others for the ones I don’t have.**

            Armin hesitated for a good minute over whether or not to continue the conversation here; it gave him time to get to the cafeteria, where most of his friends were gathering already at their usual table by the window. Only once he'd taken his seat at the perpetually sticky table did he finally decide to respond again. 

 

**Be careful, alright?**

**I’ll try not to rough too many ppl up before u get here**

**Mikasa’s w/me so we’ll kick all kinds of ass though don’t worry nobody’s gonna fuck with us right now**

**Do you want me to get there?**

**Nono no u school I’ll see u later!!**

 

            “You should have asked him to meet us,” Mikasa said.

            “You really want him around me right now?”, Eren asked. His voice sounded like it was scraping over dry rocks. “It’s not like I’ve never freaked the fuck out on him before—it’s better to just—”

            He kicked a pop can. It rattled away along the bumpy path Mikasa had dragged him down. They were in the park a few dozen blocks north of the school—one of the bigger ones in the city, meaning one that featured more than a rusty old jungle gym, a swing set, and a damp mound of sand that was supposed to pass for a playground.

            That wasn’t to say this park _didn’t_ have swings. Mikasa led Eren to one and didn’t stop staring at him until he sat. He dug the toe of one shoe into the sand as she took her own seat next to him.

            “Fucking pointless,” he muttered. When Mikasa didn’t say anything he scratched fitfully at his hair for a moment, twisted his shoe further into the sand, and said, “I don’t know why you picked here.” Mikasa shrugged. It was easier than explaining that this park was one of the first places Carla had taken her and Eren, once Mikasa had been adopted. She’d brought them to try to get them to bond, and to show Mikasa that there was still something that might pass for beautiful in this city even though her parents weren’t in it anymore. They’d fed ducks first, and once they’d run out of bread Carla had encouraged them to sit on the swings. She and Eren had just hung there pendulously next to each other for a long while before Eren had finally started swinging; Mikasa had joined in at her own pace, at her own moment. The silence hadn’t been awkward, though. Her silences with Eren were rarely awkward. After the swings they’d just sat in the sand and been fine; it was the first time she had felt fine since she’d arrived in the Jaeger household.

            “You know that she was wrong,” Mikasa said, more stiffly than she meant to, “so I don’t know what else to say…”

            “You really don’t have to say anything. You shouldn’t have to be coaching me through everything.” He wiped his nose, pulled his foot free of the sand, and kicked back slightly so that he was almost using the swing for its intended purpose. “I shouldn’t’ve freaked out. Why do I always freak out? You wouldn’t have.”

            “You’re not the freak here, Eren. Armin’s right. The world’s gone freakish.” She pulled her keys from her pocket and settled their weight in her palm. Eren thought she was just playing with them idly until she said, “We could key her car.”

            Eren stared at her.

            “Are you—what? No!”

            “We could egg her house. Very thoroughly cover it in toilet paper. Lick the doorknob of her office.”

            “I—alright, I get it. I'm being a brat.” Mikasa tossed the keys a little ways up in the air and caught them deftly.

            “Not really. We can do any of that if it’s what you think we should. We’d probably get a criminal record, though, for the first three. Possibly we’d get sick from the last one.”

            “Probably. And she’d never even know, so we’d be sick for nothing.”

            “There would be the satisfaction of knowing she’d touched it.”

            “Most of our classmates would’ve too, though. I don’t want to lick something Jean’s touched.”

            Mikasa shook her head but didn’t admonish him about projecting his anger onto an innocent party. She didn’t think he was really harbouring any dislike for Jean; it was just easy to pretend he was.

            But then, the companionable quiet they’d had the first time they’d been at this park wasn’t going to be enough. She’d never been able to be silent when Eren was having problems, or was being a problem. Today he’d already screamed himself hoarse—at her, but not _about_ her—and he’d actually run out of anger and come out looking quite spent. There wasn’t really any way for Mikasa to address what the counselor had said to him; all she felt she could do was tackle that one thing, the one facet that she felt she’d contributed to this.

            She took a breath and held it for a moment before she spoke. 

            “I’m sorry I’m leaving.”

            “Right now? I guess you do have work.”

            “Next year. For a different school.”

            Eren just about fell off his swing—saved himself with an iron grip on the chains that kept the thing supported—leaned forward, and said with absolute conviction:

            “I’m not pissed about that!” Apparently he had not _quite_ spent the last of his capacity to shout. “Why would I be pissed about that? I’m not exactly the grand master of hiding my emotions, here—you saw me when I was worried about Armin! That was me trying my absolute damndest to be subtle, alright? You’d know it if I was angry, and anyway—this is the opposite of something that’d piss me off. Doing what you want to do, I mean. That’s some—some really heroic shit, okay? Going for teamwork and sportsmanship and all that. Y’know, kids are going to see you on TV and they’re going to feel a bit less miserable about life.”

            “It’s just soccer, Eren.”

            “It’s not! Think of all the—the mini-Mikasas of the world, alright? Think of all those little girls watching whatever useless shit’s on TV, and then seeing _you_ out there all impressive and strong and—fuck. ‘Mad at you.’ Yeah right. More likely to throw you a parade. I’m going to be proud as hell of you. Fuck. Shit. I already am. Alright? And come visit us sometimes.”

            “You could come with me.”

            “ _Fuck_ that. I’ve got things to do here just like you’ve got things to do out there.”

            “The season isn’t that long. You could come to a few games. I need my cheerleaders.”

            “Fine. Just don’t be one of those people who’s always diving and cheating and fucking around. Just do what you do.”

            “I will.”

 

            The inevitable happened. About ten minutes after the final bell at school, there was a knock—not on the front door of the Jaegers’ house, but on Eren’s bedroom door. Before Eren could so much as shut the binder where he’d been gloomily scratching out study notes, Armin’s voice sounded in the hallway.

            “You really shouldn't tell staff members to fuck themselves, Eren.”

            Eren scowled when he opened the door.

            “Yeah, I’ve heard that a few times today already.” Armin stood in the doorway with his backpack slung over one shoulder and a frown on his face. He gave Eren a critical glance on his way into the room; he made directly for the bed and started pulling out textbooks. “How’d you know?”

            “Jean had an appointment too; he was in the next office over. He heard it. Just your part, though.” Once he’d set the last of his books aside he turned on his heel to face Eren. For a moment it occurred to Eren—on some base instinctual level, some twitch of instinct from his spine—that maybe quailing and begging for mercy was the thing to do. His pride squashed the notion flat, but the impulse existed long enough to register consciously.

             Armin didn’t give him the chance to puff up like an offended cat.

            “So what did she say exactly?”

            Eren had to look closer. That was definitely, absolutely anger on Armin’s face, but even though Armin was looking directly at him, Eren somehow got the sense that the wrath was directed at someone behind Eren, maybe a little to his right. All this anger wasn't at Eren. It was _for_ Eren. There really was no greater relief than realizing that Armin was on his side, and that he was here offering up an ear to scream into rather than a lecture on proper social conduct.

            Because hell if it didn’t feel good to be allowed to be pissed off.

            “She called me stupid! Too stupid to make it in—fucking social science, like I’m just a lost fucking cause for a stats class! 'Well honey you're taking really easy courses this term,' and 'I just mean, look at your _grades_.' Oh, and that was before she called me a cheater! Just directly to my face, in the same sentence she calls me ‘sweetie,’ like I’m supposed to sit there and agree with her that I’ve just been some sort of goddamn leech off of you for the past four years! She says, ‘well it’s been noted that you always sit beside the top student,’ like it’s apparently not been _noted_ that you’re my best fucking friend in the fucking world, aside from Mikasa—or noted that you tutor me, or that—I’ve been working my ass off here—”

            He paused to catch his breath. His throat still hurt from sending this tempest Mikasa’s way just a few hours earlier, but he could not have given a single damn. Not when he saw the way Armin’s lower eyelids lifted and his eyebrows lowered. Not when the slender splinters of doubt he’d had about telling Armin this were crushed so firmly underfoot.

            “Cheating’s a serious allegation,” Armin said. “She can’t do anything about that without some backup from the teachers, and they’d probably have to get me to admit that I’d helped you, since there’s no concrete proof anywhere else.”

            “There’s no concrete proof anywhere because it didn’t fucking happen!”

            “You could probably file a complaint with the school board.”

            Eren tossed a hand vaguely and then brought it up to run it through his hair.

            “Wouldn’t do anything.”

            He expected a ‘That’s not like you’ or a ‘Eren please leave the cynicism to me.’

            Instead, without even blinking Armin said, “That’s right; you always tend to aim bigger than that. Have you ever thought about school administration as a career path?”

            Eren snorted and sank onto his bed. The last of the rage seemed to be spent now.

            “No. That sounds pretty miserable. ”

            Armin sat next to him.

            “How long are you suspended for?”, he asked. The hard edge in his voice had been blunted; he’d sensed the shift in Eren’s mood. Armin was still unbelievably furious, of course, that a school official had so openly and unapologetically attacked a student—attacked _Eren_. But it wasn’t going to improve anything to remain on the warpath when Eren was calming down.

            “I’m in class again Thursday,” Eren said.

            Armin relaxed his shoulders slightly.

            “Good…”

            “Why?”

            “I…might have called Levi. A little. And said that you were suspended until the end of the week, but that that normally only covers the school week, so you should still be allowed to play in the tournament.”           

            Eren’s eyebrows rose.

            “Are you serious? You just straight-up lied to him?”

            “Ahh, not very well…”

            “What did he say?”

            “That he didn’t care and wasn't exactly going to give the scoop to the national newspaper, whether you were suspended over the weekend or not. It’s not like the rest of the staff go to our games.” He shifted his weight; he hadn't realized it until just now, but he'd sat on a book. One corner of the cover was poking into the back of his thigh. "Sorry," he said, and went to pull it out from under him, but Eren snatched it and put it behind his back before Armin could get a glance at the cover. Armin paused. "What is that?"

            "Nothing." 

            "...Alright."

             "I mean it's, uh." Eren scraped his teeth over his lower lip. "It's just sort of pointless, is all." He brought it around in front of him again, keeping both hands fixed firmly to it as if afraid Armin might yank it from his grasp. It was a slim hardcover book with watercolour pictures of flowers on the cover. "Pointless bullshit book I bought when I was like. seven." He hadn't bought it when he was 'like ten.' He knew very well that he'd bought it in the June of his seventh year, because a certain best friend of his had started helping his grandfather out in the garden and Eren had wanted to do better than just listen passively when Armin rattled off information about caring for daffodils. He remembered with perfect clarity that he'd dragged his mother to the mall to get him a 'flower book,' and that he'd got the one with the prettiest cover, because the flowers Armin had been helping to grow had been, once Armin had showed enthusiasm for them, the prettiest things Eren had yet seen. 

            "I mean it's useless," he said. "It's all about that silly, uh, flower meaning stuff, which I didn't know when I got it. And I've basically got it memorized anyway. I just look at it when I'm. You know. Rattled or upset. Or whatever."

            Armin stared at him for a good ten seconds before he remembered to blink.

            "You... Memorized an entire book on literary and cultural flower metaphors?" Eren shrugged and let his grip on the book relax. He set it down. 

            "Not on purpose or anything." 

            “I—" Armin could not keep the flash of anger from his expression. "That counselor is so—" But he'd decided not to drag Eren into another shouting fit. He took a breath. "You know you’re really smart, right? You can tell when people are hurting, and how to help. I’m terrible at that.”

            “Pfft. Case in fucking point for the counterargument, right here.”

            “It’s doesn’t count when it’s you. I remember you about as far back as my memory actually goes—this is basically giving myself a pep talk. So just listen. You pick concepts up quickly, and I’m sure about that now after tutoring those other kids before Christmas. That was like dragging them uphill through molasses compared to what it’s like with you. And you work hard, and—you want to learn." He touched the cover of the book, which rested now between him and Eren. "That’s so important. That’s so hard to keep.”

            “You did.”

            Armin shrugged.

            “It’s all I’ve got to prop up my ego, though. If I’m not smart I’m nothing.”

            “ _Armin for fuck’s sake that's not true_ —”

            "I know! But that's the way my ego looks at it. So listen—you live in this tiny grease-spot of a city with a high crime rate and a higher rate of police brutality, you’ve had some of the most apathetic or downright malevolent teachers in the district, it’s been constantly implied and now stated directly to your face that you’re never going anywhere, and—you’re still curious! You still want to learn more about the world, and better than that, you want to _change_ it. You look at this glorified trash heap and you start thinking about ways to improve it, not just ways to burn it down! Do you have any idea how important that is?”

            Eren was quiet for a long moment. Just processing. Then he leaned back on his arms and said, “You are so full of shit.”

            Armin scowled at him.

            “What?”

            “There is no way you give yourself pep talks like that. You're not a tenth as nice to yourself as you are to me.”

            “Ahh, I don’t know. Just don’t give up, alright?”

            Eren laughed.

            “As if I’d would. I’m going to prove her wrong, is what I’m going to do.” He pointed at his desk. “Look, I was even working on my math project. Aaaaaaaaaand this is my math textbook I’m sitting on here, right? Are you busy now? Do you have time to teach me what you did in class before I have to get to the gallery?”

            As Armin reached again for his backpack, he blushed and mumbled something about how he always had time for that.

 

            Armin was just finishing washing the dishes after his and his grandfather’s supper when a text from Mikasa pulled him away.

 

**Armin. Thank you. I hope he wasn’t ungrateful.**

**What?**

**I have so many angry text messages about badly-trained school officials I don’t know what to do with them.**

**That’s better than what he had been saying. So. Thank you.**

**Oh. I just—talked to him a bit. He said you did first. I think you had the biggest impact, honestly.**

**It was a joint effort.**

**Sometimes he needs taking care of. I’m glad you’ll be with him.**

 

Armin sighed, even though it was a pointless gesture when she couldn't hear it.  

**…Yeah.**

**Mikasa…next year, you know we’ll come visit you, right? I bet you Eren starts suggesting it nonstop before the first week’s out.**

**I’d take the bet. But I’d lose. He’s already insisting.**

**It might not be necessary anyway.**

**Have you picked a school, then?**

**Yes.**

**When are you going to tell us?**

**I don’t want to talk to Eren about it while he’s ranting.**

**He’s still going?**

**Yes. He’ll tell me the whole education system is corrupt and needs to be entirely revamped before I can attend.**

**Probably.**

**I’ve accepted an offer though. So I might as well tell you.**

            Armin blinked twice at the screen of his phone when the name of the university appeared.

 

**Do you want to know what school Eren and I picked?**

**It can’t do any harm now.**

**It’s the same as you.**

**I see.**

            This was why Armin didn’t much like texting with Mikasa. Eren’s emotional status was always obvious, whether in person or over the phone—but Mikasa was most easily read when he could see her eyes and her hands.

 

**Are you happy? Or disappointed?**

**This school has the most well-respected kinesiology program and also the soccer team with the best odds of being noticed on a national level. It will provide the best odds of my starting a professional career playing and later setting up a practice of my own. Their scout made me the best offer in that the scholarship there is inclusive of rent and textbook costs. There will be savings on gas because it is close to home. Carla will worry less about me if I am close.**

**I am very very happy that you and Eren will be there also. But I will lock you out when I am studying if you are too loud and I will not be put up with you two arguing. I reserve the right to have a girlfriend over. It would be unfair for you to deny that given your situation with him. I propose that we rotate cooking duty. Or collaborate.** **Also. This way it will be easier for you to come see my games.**

 

            It was past eight o’clock when Mikasa wandered into the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. Carla and Grisha were still at work, which meant she and Eren were on their own for dinner. This often meant cereal.

            It very rarely meant finding Eren over the cutting board with assorted vegetables laid out before him and a knife in his hand. She’d heard him come in after his stint working with the kids at the art gallery, but she’d really expected to find him here making oatmeal or, if he was feeling fancy, eggs—not a profusion of greenery.

            “You’re cooking?”, Mikasa asked.

            “Well Armin can’t, and as much as I love pizza, I think he’ll die if that’s all we eat next year. Salad’s supposed to be good for you, right?”

            Mikasa lifted one eyebrow, slowly.

            “I didn’t realize you were so…parental about him.”

            “When you put it like that it's creepy. And I’m not usually. Don’t tell him or he’ll flip his lid.”

            “I was talking to him today.”

            Eren shot her a glance. 

            “Unless you somehow predicted that I’d be practicing salads on his behalf—”

            “We talked about school. He said you’d picked yours.”

            “Yeah! We both kind of agreed at the same time, you know—just seems like the best option, since—” He waved the hand that wasn't holding the knife. “Forget it.”

            “It’s fine, actually. I picked too.”

            Eren tried to pretend that he hadn’t paused his wrestling match with the head of lettuce, but both of them noticed. He carried on with greater vigour than before.

            “What’d you choose it for? The team?”

            “That was part of it. There were a lot of considerations… But I talked to Armin. After I accepted their offer. We picked the same school.”

            The erratic ‘thunk’ of the knife as it met the chopping block ceased entirely.

            “Are you serious?”

            “Yes.”

            “Huh,” Eren said, but what he’d said at the park held true. His emotions couldn’t help but manifest themselves—in this case by having him tear through the rest of the lettuce with a level of frenzy rarely brought to bear on a vegetable. From there it was on to the carrots, which turned out to be more difficult adversaries. 

 

            “Um, hello?”, Armin said at ten forty-three that night. For the first time in his life, he was answering a phone call from Mikasa.

            “I told Eren that we’re going to the same school,” she said, almost directly over his greeting.

            “Oh. Good. I guess we can get started on residence applications, then.” He was trying hard not to end every sentence in a question mark.

            “The news had him in stitches.”

            “Who told you puns were a good idea?”, Eren groaned in the static-laced distance. "You need to stop with the humour experiments." 

            “Puns?", Armin asked, disentangling himself from his desk. "So—Eren actually got stitches?”

            “We’re on our way back from the hospital now.”

            "I—"

            “Mikasa!”, Eren said. “You’ll give him a fucking heart attack—it’s not anything serious. I got a bit distracted, is all.”

            “Distracted in a good way?”, Armin asked.

            “Fuck yes!” Armin could actually hear the struggle as Eren grabbed the phone and scrambled away from Mikasa with it. “I mean, this is good news, right? Not just all three of us together, but all three of us—where we want to be, and _also_ together—” Armin did not have to see Eren’s face to know that he was wearing his ‘either I’m fully confident that we’ll take over the world or I’ve forgotten to lift my eyebrows when I smile’ expression. Armin had never been able to tell which suggested cause had been the more accurate, but now he was reasonably certain.

            “Did you—” Another series of thumps and grunts. “Mikasa, was he in an accident or something? What happened?”

            “He got overexcited while making a sa—”

            “ _I told you not to tell him about thaaaaat_ —”

            His voice trailed off. Either Eren had just fallen down a very deep pit, or he’d run off.

            “Where did he go?”, Armin asked as Mikasa sighed into the phone.

            “To your house. You can inspect the stitches yourself this way, I guess.”

            “How bad was it?”

            “Not awful. He should be there any second now. We were almost home.”  

            Armin moved to his window and drew back the curtain. Sprinting along the sidewalk about a block away was familiar figure.

            “Ah. You’re right,” Armin said, and then got embarrassed because if he'd been able to hear Eren smiling just by his voice, he was sure Mikasa could hear him.

            “He’s probably going to try to climb the tree to get in your window,” Mikasa said. "That would be bad for his hand." 

            “Right. I’ll stop him.”

            Armin turned away from the window, threw his phone on his desk, and ran out to meet Eren.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, my plan for this fic has been a lot looser than it was for Homeostasis, but in the next chapter I'm planning (hoping) that things will start to come together more clearly. Thank you for sticking with it—I've appreciated really appreciated any support!


	6. Chapter 6

            The final tournament of the season, at least as far as the district was concerned, was held in the same neighbouring city in which Eren, Mikasa, and Armin would be going to school next year. Eren spent most of the drive through the city with his face pressed up against the window; he pointed out virtually everything he saw, as if they didn’t have donut shops and malls and parks in their hometown.

            "Looklook, the campus is right down that road there—" He twisted in his seat in a futile attempt to see down the street as they drove past it. "Aaaghhh, I could see the gates..." He plopped down more properly into his seat. "It's good, though," he said. "The whole place feels better than ours." 

            Even the soccer fields were better. The park had eight of them, full-sized, with clean white paint on the goalposts and sturdy metal bleachers. The ground was even, the lines were actually straight, and the grass was one uniform length that did not disguise any dips or divots in the ground. 

            Chance dealt the boys’ team clear blue skies, a cool breeze, a solid field, and three games in a row against three of the strongest teams in the district. The tournament was sudden death; if you lost a game, you didn’t get to go to the provincial level.

            As their first opponents filed along the side of the field towards their bench, Zhiganshina’s team was quiet for a moment.

            “Well height’s not everything,” Hange said. “Levi was one of the best players in the country. It’s not like this is basketball—actually you could argue that being too large would be a problem in this sport. We could use this game as a chance to see!”

            Armin wasn’t concerned about their height so much as their breadth. Some of these boys looked like they could crush Reiner flat.

            “Yeah,” Connie said, “I mean, we’re probably quicker, right Armin? And smarter.”

            “You know size actually has nothing to do with intelligence, right?”, Reiner said.

            “I don't mean that! I mean we have Armin! We’ll be fine.” He jostled Armin with his elbow. “Right?”

            “I—uh,” Armin said. “Yeah, maybe.” Jean looked at Armin flatly for a long moment.

            “We are going to get crushed,” he said.

            And they did, eventually, in their third game. But it didn’t matter.

            Really all it meant was that after their own last game on field one—a four to one loss—they had time to sprint over to field eight just in time to catch the girls going into penalty kicks with their opponents. If the Zhiganshina girls’ team had a weakness, it was their goalkeeping; but if they had one strength that stood above all of the others, it was their scorers. 

            Eren, who had led the pack over to field eight even though he’d been dragging Armin behind him, was gripping the latter’s arm so hard that Armin honestly couldn’t feel his fingers anymore. Armin didn’t comment on it. He just watched, like all of them watched, as the girls lined up and took their shots, and as the five seniors in turn—Mikasa, Annie, Sasha, Ymir, Historia—made theirs without so much as a blink. It was the other team’s game to lose, and they did so. It was Historia's goal that won it for them; it was the first penalty kick she'd ever made. 

            Then Armin was again trailing behind Eren like a slightly alarmed streamer, as Eren and the rest of the boys charged out to meet the girls. It was the first time either of Zhiganshina’s teams had secured a spot at the provincial tournament in the past four years, and anyway since the provincial tournament was held on a Wednesday, it probably meant the boys could miss a day of class to go and cheer.

            None of this was particularly relevant in Mikasa’s mind when she shouldered her way between her teammates. She wasn’t all that aware that some of them were not, in the most official sense, _her_ teammates, or that there were suddenly a lot more people on the field than there should have been.

            She homed in on a rather hapless-looking Annie, who had been dragged to the centre of the mob by Sasha. Annie saw her coming and was, for the briefest moment, unsettled out of her usual half-lidded reserve. For a moment there it looked like she was smiling.

            Mikasa wasn’t quite aware that she was, too, or that in the course of the game her hair had been pulled mostly out of its ponytail. She didn’t realize at all how lit up her expression was.

            “It’s just another tournament,” Annie said, once Mikasa was close enough to hear her.

_I don’t care_.

            “It’s even during school still, so it’s not exactly adding any time. And we still have physics together.”

_I don’t care_.

            “In six months this isn’t even going to matter.”

_I don’t care_. It wasn’t until this third repetition that Mikasa came fully to the consciousness that no, these words were not making it out her mouth—that, in fact, what she was doing with her mouth was pressing it against Annie’s to punctuate the latter’s statements. It wasn’t exactly that she hadn’t been able to feel this happening. It was more that she’d known instinctively that the action was in fact standing in lieu of the words, conveying their same meaning. It did not matter that in six months Annie was going to be out of Mikasa’s life. Right now she was standing near enough to be kissed by Mikasa, trying to disguise as exasperated sighing something that Mikasa knew was closer to disbelieving, embarrassed laughter. 

            That wasn’t a sound that Mikasa got to hear enough.

 

            Ten minutes later most of the boys’ team was still trying to convince Levi that he should run up some permission slips to allow them to skip class for the provincial tournament. Armin, whose loyalties were torn between an assignment due that Wednesday and his desire to support his friends, bowed out early and made for the bus to avoid the conflict of interest. The driver was out—probably finishing off his dinner somewhere nearby, as Armin’s growling stomach reminded him—and for a moment Armin thought he had the place to himself.

            As he made his way back to his seat, however, he couldn’t help but notice a pair of thick, woolly, inhabited brown soccer socks in his path. Jean was lying on the bus seat, with his lanky legs jutting out into the aisle.

            Armin considered just walking right off the bus, thinking that his footsteps were soft enough that he hadn’t disturbed the apparently napping boy.

            But Jean was very much awake.

            “I’m jealous and a prick,” he declared abruptly.

            Armin, who’d already halfway turned around, turned back and frowned. Admittedly Jean and Marco had not been spotted near one another quite as often lately, but Armin hadn’t seen anyone flirting with Marco, and he certainly hadn’t seen Marco flirting with anyone.

            “Of who?”

            “Eren.”

            “I…what?”

            Jean threw both his arms up into the air briefly; when they fell back down they folded over his face.

            “He’s got you! And Mikasa! I don’t mean like—he’s dating you, though props to him for that I guess because I honestly expected him to have fucked it all up by now, but the point is—he’s taking his two best friends, one of whom is his damned boyfriend even if you fuckers won’t admit it, to school with him. And you’re both going to stay with him for the rest of your miserable lives, probably. And me? I’m staying in the junkiest town known to humankind, forever, while all my friends and my boyfriend—ex-boyfrend, I guess—go off to hell knows where.”

            Armin winced. It would have been easy to just go back to the others and pretend that Jean was not there for the rest of the day. Jean probably wouldn’t have even resented him for it. Instead, Armin took the nearest seat.  

            “You broke up?”

            “Not—really, I don’t fucking know—we’re _going_ to, though. In August at latest. So what’s even…the point… How do you do it?”

            “Do what?”

            “Get rid of this kind of shit. You’ve done it before. You don’t still have a crush on me.”

            “Um…no, not really. But it’s not like I had some scientific, medical technique. Mostly I just…stomped it down with a lot of confusion and self-hate. I can't really recommend that as a general practice.”

            Jean unfolded one arm just enough that he could peer up at Armin.

            “Are you fucking kidding? Over _me?_ I swear, if you believed for half a second that you didn’t deserve _me_ —fucking hell, that’s ridiculous…”

            “I didn’t get a lot of say in it.”

            “Ugh…”

            Armin looked around. A few of the other boys had gathered by the side of the bus and were talking about who knew what. It didn’t matter. The rest of the team was on its way back.

            Armin’s protective impulses didn’t work quite the same way that, say, Eren’s did, or Mikasa’s. But he did have them, and they certainly came into effect for Jean. He didn't really want him getting teased right now, especially since Marco was going to be on the bus too.          

            “We’re going to be leaving soon,” Armin said. “You should get back to your car.”

            Jean and Historia had driven rather than take the bus. Historia’s notion had been that this way, if anyone wanted to stop and get dinner on the way home, they could facilitate that. In practice it had just meant that she’d floored it so that she and Ymir could get to the field early and make out in her car before the others arrived.

            “Fuck it,” Jean said.

            “You can’t just leave it here.”

            “I don’t even care. I’m not moving.”

 

            The seat where Eren and Armin had sat on the way to the city was disappointingly empty when Eren reached it—but just as he reached it, and before he got around to wondering about where Armin had gotten to, his phone went off.

 

**Eren, I’m going back with Jean, alright? If they bother to do a headcount, just tell them that.**

**Ok cool**

**Live it up bc we sure as hell aren’t going to have a car next year**

**Does he even have air conditioning though I mean what is the point if he doesn’t**

**Oh ya and did something happen**

**He’s just kind of upset, and given his driving record I’d just rather be on hand to make sure he’s focused on the road than find out later that he wound up in the ditch.**

**Ok**

**Wait hold up dont let him start the fuckin car**

**\---**

**Jean if u crash and kill Armin I will walk along the highway until I can find you and break ur fuckng head ok**

**I’m not gonna crash jaeger. stfu. the point of him being here’s that i won’t. and don’t fucking talk to me all casual n shit until you work out how to stop your phone from automatically capitalizing your ‘i’s because you look like a pompous piece of shit.**

**You just called me pompous over text man time for pot to meet kettle** **there’s no way to win when you do that**

**Besides, you clearly screwed around with your phone settings so that you’d look all casual since u didn't used to text like this**

**And wow that has the opposite effect**

**now i'll crash out of spite. say goodbye to your cute boyfriend**

**JEAN YOU FUCKING TRASH HEAP I KNOW YOU’RE JOKING BUT FUCKING DON’T**

**DON’T FUCK AROUND ABOUT THIS KIND OF THING HIS PARENTS LITERALLY DIED IN A CAR CRASH YOU ABSOLUTE DIRTBAG**

**are you serious**

**fuck.**

**fine, ok? you’ll see him in a bit over an hour perfectly unharmed and with no knowledge i made that comment.**

**Why a bit over an hour**

**Aren’t you leaving like now**

**fuck no. unlike you forwards the midfields actually kind of put some effort in in that last game so i’m getting some fuckin food. Armin’s coming too because he’s being such a pleasant little shit.**

            Jean and Armin were, in fact, already standing in line at a surprisingly busy fast-food place not far from the park. Jean was frowning severely as he slipped his phone back into his pocket.

            “You can do better than a milkshake,” he said. “You’re doing this so I keep my car. I can spring for a burger.”

            “I’m sort of a slow eater,” Armin said. “It’s better if I have something I can take in the car.”

            “Fine, fine. It’s not like I’m exactly worried about you ruining the upholstery or anything, but no, fine, don’t eat.”

            Armin sighed and didn’t bother trying to disguise it. They seemed to be beyond social artifice at this point.

            “Fries, then,” he said. The people ahead of them were already ordering; he didn’t see why this needed to be a point of contention and risk slowing down the queue. Jean brightened up a little. “But also the shake.”

            “Done.”

            That was the last conversation they had until they were again in Jean’s car. Armin had managed to finish off the fries before Jean was done with his meal, but he brought the milkshake with him.

            At the park Jean had managed to find a shady spot to leave his car, so Armin hadn’t particularly noticed the temperature when he’d first gotten in. As they pulled out onto the highway, however, and as Armin found his arm adhering to the armrest, he felt he could confirm to Eren that no, Jean did not have air conditioning.

            “Sorry,” Jean said, having heard the tell-tale sound of skin sticking to plastic as Armin shifted. “AC broke a few weeks ago. Like, as soon as the weather started warming up. The car’s an actual trashcan. I’m amazed it’s stayed on the road this long.”

            He didn't offer even the most half-hearted apology to his car for talking about it in this way, so Armin knew his mood wasn't imptoving.  

            “It doesn’t bother me,” Armin said, but quietly tried to orient himself around the perspiring paper cup in his hands. Jean let out a long breath through his nose. Armin wasn’t sure what exactly it was meant to signify, but he knew it probably was not related to his most recent comment, so he kept quiet. He kept himself busy by watching the lines on the highway as they wobbled back and forth—inconsistencies in their painting made more fluid by speed.

            “I mean, it’s both of them. Marco and Eren,” Jean said at great length.

            “How?”, Armin asked.

            “Eren’s always yapping about how awful the whole city is, all the politicians and lawyers and—police. Which is what I want to go for, right? Police foundations—I’m accepted to the course and everything. And at first I write Eren off as not knowing what he’s talking about, but—I can only see Ymir get hauled into the station so many times before I start to wonder, you know? And so I think, wow, he's right, maybe I should just get the hell out of here like everyone else. That way I'd at least maybe be able to see some of my friends sometimes. But then Marco’s always so fuckin’ hopeful about the whole thing, and so then I _want_ to stay again, and—I’m too damn young to be having an existential crisis, alright?! Literally every option here is a bullshit waste of time.”

            “Every option’s difficult, probably. I don’t think every one’s a waste, though.”

            “That's kind of weird to hear from you. What would you do, if you weren’t going to be using that big brain as a springboard out of here?”

            “I don’t know what I’m doing in reality, let alone hypothetically…but if I was in your position I’d…” It wasn’t as easy to answer as Armin had thought. His first instinct was to say he’d stay off the police force, knowing that they were corrupt. Then of course there was the need for money, which couldn’t very well be sidestepped—Jean lived with his mother for now, but he couldn’t expect that to last, and his part-time cashier shifts at the grocery store would not be enough to pay for food and rent and all the other necessities.

            _So maybe I’d just join and let myself be corrupt_ , Armin thought with a sigh and a drooping gaze. He dropped his head against the cool glass of the window.

_Well, no, actually…Eren would still be there, and he’d help me…_

            He lifted his head again.

            “Just how closely do you listen to Eren?”

            Jean's brow knitted. 

            “Pretty closely. He can be kind of interesting. Sometimes. I guess.”

            “Then where’d you get the idea that he’s written the police off entirely?”

            “Armin, he calls them pigs.”

            “Yeah, but…maybe Marco’s not all wrong? Maybe they don’t have to be that way…?”

            “I guess Eren’s never been as cynical a piece of shit as me and you. What, you’re saying you think I could change things from the inside? That seems a little over-the-top.”

            Armin shrugged. Grand general statements really were not his strength.

            “Eren might say that. I’m saying…I think you could not take bribes, or arrest Ymir every time she crossed your path… And Eren and Mikasa will be there—they’ll help you. You know they’ll yell at you if they think you’re not doing what you should be. Marco might come back, and even if he doesn’t—”

            “At least all his damn optimism might be a useful motivator,” Jean said. He gave another long sigh and sagged in his seat. “Yeah, you’re right. Hell.”

            “What?”

            “I think you’re my best friend.”

            It would have taken more fortitude than Armin possessed not to be concerned and somewhat offended about the resignation in Jean's voice. 

            “Is…that a problem?”

            He jolted more upright again.

            “No! I’m just going to like this shitty city a bit less when you’re not in it calling it out all the time.”

            “Jean, you’re just bouncing back from a meltdown. Maybe don’t think about things like that right now.”

            “Yeah, yeah.” Armin wasn’t sure whether Jean was looking at the road or just at the windshield for a few moments while he thought up a new, less disheartening topic. “We’ve got that project coming up, right? For physics? Have you thought about it at all?”

            Armin did not like physics. Well, really, physics did not like Armin, at least the way this particular teacher presented it. All the same, he was thrilled to be able to talk about this if it meant getting Jean’s mind someplace a bit less grim. Jean had been over the moon about the project, mainly because they'd been told to pair up to do it and Mikasa, rather than going with Armin as she normally might have, had partnered with Annie. This had left the smartest kid in the class free to be scooped up by Jean, whose marks in the course were desperately flagging alongside those of most of his classmates. 

            “A little," Armin said. "I’m not that worried about it.”

            “Really? I remember one time in ninth grade you got so scared about that meiosis presentation you ran out and—did you puke? I was never that sure. Eren probably knows, so I could ask him I guess…”

            “I did _not_ ,” Armin said, “puke. I just needed some air.”

            “Yeah, sure.”

            “And I don’t care as much as I used to. About what other people think, I mean—I wasn’t afraid of the teacher then, either. It was the rest of you.”

            “Well I’m glad you’ve come to see us as the unworthy cockroaches that we are.” He snickered when he saw Armin’s expression in his peripheral vision. “Don’t worry, holy shit. I know you don’t think like that. It’s just funny to piss you off.”

            “You’re the worst. What I _mean_ is, people are just people now. At least the ones at school. They’re all as ridiculous as me; it’s not as scary now. Tutoring Eren and Mikasa probably helped. I mean, lately it’s actually sort of…”

            The thread of what he was saying frayed down to nothing. While he stared blankly at the dash, Jean said, “I guess I can’t really be worried about it if you’re not. Worst case scenario, you come swooping in at the last minute like the academic avenger you are and save our asses. I don’t know how many times the rest of us would’ve failed if you hadn’t been around. Shit. I’m glad I spilled my lunch tray on you in sixth grade, now. Eren never would’ve tried to defend your bloody honour; I never would’ve known any of you this well.”

            “I told you, I’m not…I’m not going anywhere—”

            Armin’s tone was off. It lacked the usual precision, and there was something else wrong with it that Jean couldn't describe. But it wasn’t normal, and it was enough to get him to look over. Armin was staring straight ahead. His eyes were round, and his face was changing colour rapidly.

            “You okay?”, Jean asked. His voice had an edge of nervousness honed by experience.

            “I’m fine,” Armin said, “I-I’m…”

            “Man, seriously, you don’t look good—I’m going to pull over—”

            Through some bizarre instinct, as if he was conditioned by years of parenting, Jean moved his arm across Armin’s chest while he prepared to make the turn. Armin caught his arm without even looking down.

            “No,” he said, “no, don’t—we have to get back. I—really need to talk to Eren and Mikasa, this is important—”

            “Can you call them?”

            Armin could hear Jean biting his lip more than he could see it.

            “No,” he said. “It has to be face to face. Don’t worry, though, it’s good, it’s really good—”

 

            When Eren received the text asking him to meet Armin at the latter’s house, his fingers started to buzz and subsequently lost all feeling. The thought that immediately rammed its way through his consciousness was that Armin had lost patience with him and was going to announce a decision, one way or the other, about whether they were dating or not or whatever it was going to be and Eren was frantically trying to prepare himself to meet it head on—

            At which point he got the second message asking him if Mikasa was busy. He took a moment to breathe. Armin was not cruel. He would not invite Mikasa along in order to dump him (if Eren could actually be dumped, given that they were not formally dating). He also probably would not ask her to be there so that he could lecture Eren about indecision and then ask him out. That would be weird. 

            All there was to do then was get to Armin’s house and wait. Armin’s grandfather was home, which made it a bit awkward when Eren let himself and Mikasa in with the key Armin had given them—but the man quite simply asked them to have a seat wherever they liked and then put the kettle on for them.

            The tea he made them (peppermint) had barely had time to steep before somewhere outside Armin yelled, "Thank you Jean!" and a car door slammed shut. Eren had just gotten to his feet when front door crashed open with a jangle. There was no second clatter to indicate that it had been shut.  

            Armin—still in full uniform complete with cleats—skidded into the kitchen. His first sentence, pushed down with an hour’s worth of pressure, popped out at a pitch that would have embarrassed him, had he the time for that.

            “I’ll teach!”, he said to a kitchen full of faces he loved, and familiar pots and pans and kettles and plants. Eren opened his mouth to say something, but Armin kept right on going. “It’s so obvious, especially lately with—Eren, and me, and everything— This way I can stay here and make a difference too—if this city needs something it’s teachers who’re willing to actually teach, and who care about what they’re doing. I’m going to be able to stay here! And if it’s not enough—because it might not be, if I’m really being honest— I _know_ you can do masters’ studies long-distance, so I can do that from here while I teach. I can stay here, with you, and grandpa, and Mikasa if she’s still around, and Jean—I’ll get to stay—”

            And then Eren was across the kitchen to meet him, clapping one hand to either side of Armin’s face and drawing their foreheads close enough together that Armin’s hair tickled his forehead.

            Armin was normally the sort to shirk eye contact, if he could—not always out of shyness, because he had not been shy with Eren since he’d given him his very first mini-lecture on why beetles were really much more interesting if you _didn’t_ crush them. But he usually had other things to think about, or other things he’d rather be looking at. Today he looked straight ahead at Eren.

            “Are you sure?”, Eren asked. “Are you sure that’s what you want—?”

            “Yes!” Armin shrugged away so that he could address his grandfather and Mikasa as well. “You know I’m happiest when I’m tutoring—I’ve been better at presentations this year, high school kids’ opinions haven’t mattered to me since I found out most of us are awful anyway—I’ll be able to help—this is—”

 

            It was a problem, is what it was. Eren had been deluding himself lately with all the typical living-in-the-moment philosophies, the ‘enjoy it while it lasts,’ the ‘it’ll all work out,’ the ‘work your ass off with what you’ve got.’ They normally suited him so well, especially with the way Mikasa and Annie were handling the imminent end of their relationship, and the way Jean _wasn’t_ handling the probable end of his. He’d thought, if Mikasa was doing it this way, it must make sense on some level. And it must have, for her, but she and Annie were going to be on opposite sides of the country within the next few months. He and Armin, meanwhile, were going to be in the same damn dorm—possibly the same bedroom. Barring really exceptional circumstances and some very serious falling outs, that would be the case for the next four years.

            And now there was an ‘after that’ to tackle, too.

            Eren had felt a bit guilty when his feelings for Armin had first started to tend towards pinkish. They’d been best friends all their lives, and at first Eren had felt quite betrayed by these romantic leanings. He’d been afraid that it meant that his friendship with Armin had been somehow insufficient, and had rarely felt so insulted in his life. The course of senior year had helped to settle him, a bit. The way he’d always felt about Armin was still there, and still the primary source of affection. He’d in no way lost the urge to just pointlessly play with Armin’s hair or watch terrible movies with him or deliberately order all the worst toppings on the pizza just to see if Armin would eat it. That hadn’t faded any more than his early platonic urges to kiss Armin’s nose or hug him or hold his hand. All the old ways of touching, talking, and feeling were still very much present; there was just a somewhat different cast to them now.  

            And it was a mess. It was a big, tangled mess lumped together in Eren’s chest, and he didn’t care anymore. The basic core of it was simple enough. Now that at least a part those feelings were a full-blown, glow-in-the-dark fuchsia, and now that Armin had confirmed his were at least blushing a little and that he was curious about investigating the redder hues, Eren felt it was only fair to both of them that he say his piece. Formally. Properly. Even if it marked no clear distinction, he wanted to say it. 

            The trouble was method. Whenever an issue arose that required a strategy, Eren’s immediate instinct was to turn to Armin. Since that was not an option here, he found himself discussing the issue the next day as he walked home from work with Mikasa, at great enough volume that Armin was probably at risk of overhearing it anyway.

            Hell, he could be flying overhead in a helicopter and he would probably be able to get the general idea of it from all the arm-waving.

            Mikasa had been enduring all this for the past half hour, as well as all through their overlapping break at work. While she couldn’t say that she was tired of it, she was certainly bordering on vexed with the proportions to which he was blowing the whole thing. 

            “You’re eighteen, Eren. Just because you’ve never been in this situation before doesn’t mean—”

            “I know! I know I’m probably overreacting or—overestimating, or whatever. But—still, just—what do you think?”

            Mikasa stooped. It had rained earlier in the day and loosened a lot of the neighbourhood leaves and flowers free of their branches. One particularly productive plant had shed pale blue blossoms all over the sidewalk. Once she had her desired flower in hand, she continued walking. Eren had jetted on ahead like he hadn’t noticed, but she caught up with him easily.

            “People give rings. You even suggested it, earlier.”

            “That was desperation talking. He’d run the hell away from me! This is part of the problem—that’s way too much and it wouldn’t be fair—”

            She clapped a hand on his shoulder, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “‘Let’s go on a date and then make out,’” with perfect deadpan seriousness. Eren shrugged away from her.

            “That’s too blunt!”

            “Eren.”

            “I…yeah, okay, I’m also too blunt. But I think I should maybe not be, here? Since it’s Armin?” Mikasa twirled the flower around between her fingers.

            “But since it’s Armin, he knows you’re like that. He likes you.”

            “Likes. Yeah… But you don’t think I should try to be better?”

            Mikasa didn’t actually have an answer for that. The best she could do was, “Would this _be_ better? He’s not scared of you. So just don’t give him a reason to be. He likes you.” Really, she knew Armin would be insulted if Eren assumed he was some flighty, quivering dove. Armin had weathered many of Eren’s passing rages and brawls and impassioned rants; he’d pulled him back from the brink of the former two without flinching. She was honestly surprised Armin hadn't given Eren an earful about avoiding him after the argument with the guidance counselor. 

            “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. And I know he _knows_. It’s just a matter of doing it at the right time.”

            “Prom’s coming up.”

            “I’m not going to ask him to prom." Then he snorted. "I mean, I _am._ But I’ve got to do it before that or I’m a total failure.”

            “A lot of perfectly respectable people would disagree with you.”

            “I mean for me that’d be failure! I just need a—way.”

            Mikasa was still for a moment and then held the flower out towards him. Eren paused too, for the first time since he’d set out from work.

            “Oh—I get it, it’s blue like his eyes, right?”

            “Similar," Mikasa said with a slight shrug, and held the thing closer to him.

            "You don’t think flowers are a little typical?”, Eren asked, but he was frowning like his brain was working something through. Mikasa shook her head.

            “Not for you,” she said. And waited. He would get there. 

            The frown disappeared from Eren's face. He took the flower quite gently, stared into it like he’d find a message at the centre, and then lifted his head again to look along the street. 

            “I—know exatly what I’m going to do, thanks Mikasa—”

            Eren bolted around the first corner that would take him to Armin’s house. Mikasa thought of gathering another of the flowers, but there weren’t any strewn on the sidewalk where she stood now, and she’d hate to pluck one from its branch. Better to let it go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Almost done! There should only be one or two more chapters after this. I haven't written the ending yet so I have no idea yet how long it'll be—but there's not a ton left.


	7. Chapter 7

            Annie opened the apartment door knowing that Mikasa would be standing on the other side of it. The place didn’t see visitors often, and Reiner and Bertl had learned early to call in advance. Mikasa never had, and Annie had never minded.

            They didn’t waste any time on the doorstep. Annie shrugged away from the door, and Mikasa followed her into the small, dim apartment. The television was on in the living room, and the couch was empty. Annie’s father was out. That was good. Mikasa’s backup plan had been to ask Annie if she wanted to go grab some dinner, but it was easier this way. She'd rather be direct. 

            She followed Annie into the kitchen. The kettle must have been already on, because it was whistling shrilly now. Annie swiped it onto another element on the stove, then pulled a mug from the cupboard and spooned out some instant coffee mix into it. Her own mug was already sitting on the counter, waiting to be filled.

            “What do you want to do?”, Mikasa asked. There wasn’t much point in preamble. They’d never been all that good at it anyway

            “Kissing would be nice,” Annie said as she emptied the kettle into the mugs. When she stirred the mix, the spoon clinked loudly.

            “Next year,” Mikasa said once Annie had ceased.

            “I want to get to the opposite side of the country and never think about this place again.”

            “Even though we were here.”

            Annie’s gaze flitted over to her, just for a moment.

            “I thought we agreed at the start not to get all sentimental about this.”

            “I know.”

            “If you’re going to give me a speech about your heart overriding logic—”

            “I looked at the university tournament matchups from the most recent year. My school and yours frequently play each other once they’re past the division stage. They’re both strong schools; they both always make it to semifinals.”

            “So what?”

            “So we can still play. Even though it’s over, we can still play.”

            “You really don’t let go, do you?”

            “Why should I? We won’t be together, but we’re not going to be on different planets. You’re important to me.”

            Annie sighed and passed Mikasa her mug. Her fingers lingered on it a moment longer than they should have when she realized that she really did think of it as _Mikasa’s_ mug, even though she had bought it herself. They didn’t get as much time together as they could have. It was always just moments here and there, before or after shifts at work, or in those brief hours before her father came home. All the same, Mikasa had made at least one small claim on the space—not deliberately, not consciously.

            _Two, really_ , Annie thought with embarrassment that didn’t show on her face.

            “So you’re not arguing that it’s over,” she said.

            Mikasa shook her head.

            “It'll be over,” she said. “But there can be epilogues.” Annie snorted.

            “You just want me to go easy on you if we ever play against each other.”

            “No.” As she said it she reached out. Her fingers glanced across the strip of pale blond hair that fell before Annie’s face, baring—just for one moment—a blue eye opened slightly wider than normal.

            Annie took her meaning. She didn’t need it stated. It wasn’t anything lasting or fixed that Mikasa wanted; it was just those little touches, those little moments they’d never given the proper space to breathe or grow. They would be out on their own next year more than they’d ever been before; they’d be able to make the time where they wanted it, and if they didn’t, it was by their own choice.

            It was going to change. Maybe they’d never play each other, or maybe they’d simply never bother to meet up afterwards. Maybe they’d wind up talking online, or never hearing from each other again. Whatever it was going to be, it wasn’t going to be what they had now.

            Mikasa looked anything but terrified at the prospect. She was standing there holding her damn coffee cup with its damn pink stripe around the circumference with a huge damn smile on her face.

            _Brave as hell_ , Annie thought, and hid her own smile in her cup. Once she emerged again, she said, “Come on. I’ve got a game up; loser makes the next round of coffee.” 

 

            Armin was up late finishing a round of preliminary research for his and Jean’s physics assignment. Jean hadn’t come over—really more because he was embarrassed than anything—but they’d been texting often. Their conversation of course tended to drift away from their actual research assignment. The most recent message Armin had received had been a lengthy, meandering brochure on the potential benefits of switching programs.

 

**I mean nursing’s good right. it helps people. and I’ve got pretty good science grades so I can probably transfer fine if the program's not full.**

**I thought you were alright with the police program?**

**I am, but I kind of want to be better than alright with my potential future career. and I’m not wild about the idea of shooting people for a living. think about how much Eren will piss himself at the thought of me contributing all this fucking sunshine and light to the world.**

**actually don’t think about that. it's gross. but consider that I’ll still be able to help from the inside this way.**

**Yes; sometimes literally.**

**hoLY SHIT ARMIN**

**Sorry.**

**I just. I had no idea you were grosser than I was.**

**but yeah I'd make a good nurse right? or maybe like a paramedic or something.**

**With your driving record...**

**I didn't say ambulance driver. but what do you think do you think i would make an okay paramedic**

            This received an instant affirmative. Admittedly Armin wasn't sure how happy Jean would be, dealing with that many suffering people; but he thought he'd like helping them more than arresting them. At least this way his efforts might have a somewhat more tangible result. Of course, Jean then immediately recanted and went back to the potential benefits of joining the police force. When the back-and-forth showed no signs of stopping Armin just set his phone aside and waited for a pause long enough to suggest another question mark had been sent his way. There was no real point interjecting in what was effectively an internal monologue; he probably couldn't affect the way this turned out, and he wasn't really sure that he _should_. Jean would get there himself, wherever he was going. 

            While he waited, Armin continued to scan tables of numbers on the internet for any potentially useful information for their assignment. The next sound he heard was not the buzz of Jean's continued career struggle, but more of a scrape. It was coming from out in the back yard. He paused and moved to the study window, but it was nearly ten o’clock at night. He could make out the dim forms of the garage and the fence, but there was darkness all between. If there was something out there, he’d need a flashlight to be sure.

            He crept downstairs, moved quietly past his sleeping grandfather in his chair, and found the flashlight they kept in one of the kitchen drawers. So armed, he approached the back door. Once there he was even more certain. There was something moving out there, and not by the wall of the house where they kept the garbage cans. That would have been the obvious location had the guest been a raccoon.  

            _P_ _robably a burglar, then_ , Armin thought. It annoyed him. This was not the sort of neighbourhood he felt that thieves should have been targeting, unless they were really into decades-old computers, mid-priced frying pans and DVDs of terrible movies. Hell, maybe someone had just stumbled drunkenly into his yard and could use some help.

            He pushed the flimsy screen door open. All of a sudden the yard was as silent as it was dark, which made Armin pause in fumbling with the flashlight’s ‘on’ button.

            “Uh,” said a voice from the direction of the back fence. Even if Armin had not instantly recognized the voice, he would have inferred the speaker’s identity from this location; that was the fence nearest the Jaegers’ house. 

            “Eren? What are you doing out there? Did you forget your soccer ball?”

            Since it had been so much warmer lately, they’d been able to study out on the back stoop again—which meant Eren had again taking to messing around with footwork while Armin and Mikasa worked through their physics homework. He'd declared that he was going to try out for the men's soccer team at their university, and that failing that he would go for intramurals. All attempts to convince Armin to join him at tryouts had ended in failure, though Armin had quietly decided that if Eren went out for the university's intramural league, he might just let himself be persuaded. They took anyone who was willing to play, and as long as his coursework didn't become  _too_ overwhelming, Armin didn't see the problem with giving it an attempt. 

            “Yeah!", Eren said. "Just figured I’d grab it now so I don’t forget. Bye Armin!”

            There was a clang as Eren tossed something over the fence. Soccer balls did not typically produce sounds like that. Before Armin could get the flashlight on, Eren was over the fence and gone.

            “Wait—”

            Armin ran to the fence. Just as he’d pulled himself up, before he was high enough to even think about finding purchase for his feet, Eren’s face appeared before him. Armin had no time to register this before Eren was kissing him, and no time to kiss him back before Eren dropped away again.

            “I’ll see you tomorrow!”, Eren said, and was gone.

 

            He came back the next morning long before it was time to pick Armin up for school. It had been a necessary tactical choice. He'd wanted to get out of his house before Mikasa could see how twitchy he was, and he'd needed to arrive at Armin's before seven fifteen. Any later than that and Armin would probably have been out poking around in the garden, which was the last thing Eren needed. So, he found himself knocking on Armin’s front door at five to seven, bouncing up and down on his toes so rapidly that he was surprised he wasn’t releasing some sort of hum.

            The door had hardly opened before he pitched  towards it, arms extended.

            “Here,” he said.

            Armin—dressed for school, but with his hair still a dripping mess after his shower—blinked. Eren was holding a ruddy clay flowerpot towards him with both hands. Before Armin could even form the thought that Eren was offering him a cheap copy of Marco’s gift for Jean, his gaze travelled up the slender stem to the brilliant red bloom on top of it. He didn’t have to go around the house to confirm. This was the tulip that had been growing in that hazardous location in the back yard. “Figured it’d be safer from the lawnmower this way,” Eren said. “I mean there’s also this—” He hauled from his backpack a somewhat squashed and worse-for-wear cluster of flowers, held together with the sort of thick elastic band that kept broccoli together. “Which I didn’t loot from your garden, so don’t worry. I got kind of carried away with it, though, and it ended up being a little too sappy, and anyway I know it’s hideous because fuck flower arranging, seriously. Still lifes are not really my thing, you know? Plus, a lot of flowers have multiple meanings and I didn’t want you getting the wrong idea about me accusing you of, say, artifice, or implying that you should be more modest, or anything like that, so—” He tossed the makeshift bouquet onto the porch rail and pushed the pot a little so that it nudged against Armin’s chest. Armin’s hands lifted automatically to meet it. “I know this exact one won’t last too much longer, since I looked it up and they don't do great in pots, but you can just replant it or whatever. The point's not really that you keep it right there. I mean—do you know what this one means?”

            Armin shook his head; he felt a little foggy about this whole thing, honestly, and he wasn’t used to it. He'd had his shower already; he was supposed to be up and running by now. He wasn't used to being mystified by Eren, of all people. Eren was smiling the way he did whenever he finished anything—a desk, a present, a project—he was particularly proud of.

            “I was hoping for that. Red tulips are pretty straightforward—it’s a declaration of love.”

            All of a sudden all that haze and murk in Armin’s had was transfigured to absolute clarity, all centred around one blazing, all-illuminating word: _Oh_. Maybe if it hadn't been so early in the morning, he might have been disappointed in his vocabulary; but he was in no state to complain, even about himself. He had been expecting to be asked out, but not _this_. 

            “But I already knew that,” he fumbled, because Eren was right there before him, with shining eyes and this huge smile totally free from doubt, as if he’d just identified the sun as a star and not his feelings for Armin as love. Armin supposed he should have seen it coming; Eren didn't do things halfway. He should have counted himself lucky Eren hadn't robbed a flower shop and turned up with a truckload of red tulips. 

            “No—I don’t just mean I love you, because wow, no, that’s been obvious since kindergarten. I mean I’m in love with you.”

            Which of course Armin actually did understand—but hearing it stated so directly ramped up the intensity of that internal light source so much it made him squint. Because, _Oh_. He and Eren had been on the same page all this time, but Eren had been finding subtext where Armin had been scanning for plain-stated facts.

            Only now, this was a fact too. Armin did not need a mirror to know that he had turned as red as the flower.

            “Was that too much too soon?”, Eren said. “Sorry—I know we haven’t been exactly, uh—not dating, but kissing, for all that long, and I get that we’re young still, but I figured—we’ve known each other since we were five, you know? So this’s just me. You don’t have to—”

            “Um!”, Armin said, because he was absolutely not going to let this conversation slide away into a string of apologies. Eren had finally come to him with this, and Armin had no intention whatsoever of letting him snatch it back and hide it in some dark recess forever. Eren didn't do things halfway, and Armin _liked_ that. “I mean—I always have, and it’s been really in pretty much the same way the whole time to the point that I didn’t even notice it changed like this because it was hardly a change in the first place and that’s—that’s actually really amazing to me, in the best way, and also sort of sociologically interesting, or maybe psychologically I don't know—” It occurred to him at this point that he had not actually said it yet. “And you are my best friend and I love you—”

            _I love you I love you I love you I love you_ —

            He meant what he’d said. It was like he’d always thought, when it had occurred to him in the past that if he ever fell for Eren he might not even notice it happening. There was hardly even a difference. But saying that out loud, that he loved Eren and always had— _that_ was certainly different, and that was what had his heart pumping so fast. Because, god, this was allowed. This could be an unstated fact, an accepted silent truth of their relationship, but did not have to be. It could be screamed out on a porch at seven in the morning if they wanted. And that was so much more important than kissing or sex or holding hands.

            “Oh fuck," Eren said, "you are really attractive when you’re flustered, help me—”

            “No!”, Armin said. “You did it in the first place—you deserve this!”

            “You did it too!”

            “You started it!”

            They giggled nervously, both at the same time. Once he was sure Armin had the flower firmly in hand, Eren stuck his hands in his jeans pockets and rocked back on his heels. 

            “I guess I could’ve just done it sooner,” Eren said.

            “Why’s that?”

            “I was only waiting because I thought it’d be pretty shitty to say ‘Hi I’m in love with you bye see you never,’ or tell you when you weren’t really…in for that kind of deal? Like, I didn’t want to make you feel weighed down, or make you regret anything." Armin had gotten over his crush on Jean, and on Annie, but they had never been reciprocated. Instinctively, Eren felt that Armin would carry the weight with him if he'd learned Eren loved him but still elected to leave—and that was to leave out the grimmer fear that Armin might have chosen _not_ to leave, specifically for Eren. The thought of doing that to one of his two best friends been eating Eren alive for months. " _But_ —if you’re sticking around anyway, I figured, why the hell not?”

            “…But we’ve known for a long time that I’m going to the same school as you.”

            “The same school. But if after that you were going to go hiking around the world collecting plant samples, or something, I’d probably never see you again. Because, I mean, at least on my part, this isn’t really a few months’ of not-quite dating, or half a year’s worth of crushing. For me, this’s all tangled up in thirteen years’ worth of best friendship. Obviously I haven’t—y’know, been in _love_ with you—that whole time, but I’ve loved you that whole time, and this’s just another part of that and it’s not a part of that that I want to get a whole lot more prominent if you’re going to leave, because it’s like—it’s the ‘I want to marry you’ sort of love, you know?”

            Armin chose to sit rather than fall over at some unexpected moment; he folded up onto the boards of the porch with a sudden  _thwump_. He said the only thing he felt he really could, in the face of this.

            “Eren,” he said, in a voice that was a squeaking sort of whisper, “I know you want to be a revolutionary and all that, but you can’t propose marriage before you ask me out.”

            “What? Shit—I didn’t mean to—I don’t mean I think we should get married _now_ , I just—it’s that _kind_ of feeling and I think if the whole living together thing works out as well as I know it’s going to, I would...not be opposed to that. At some point! So do you want to go out with me? Or just prom. We could start with just prom if you want—”

            “Do you know how to dance?”

            Armin’s voice was firmer than Eren had had any reason to expect. Armin's face was still a mess of red and pink, and he was still seated on the porch with a potted tulip clutched to his stomach, but his eyes had changed.

            “More or less,” Eren said. Armin set the tulip aside—carefully, with a gentle thump as it met the porch.

            “Prove it.”

            “Right now? There’s no music.”

            “Eren, you just stole a tulip from my backyard, put it in a pot, threw it at me as a present, and then I fell down with it in full public view. You really can’t deny we’re a pair of silly jackasses, so we might as well.”

            “We? I thought you were going to make me do this by myself. Hell, if it’s _we_ —”

            Armin reached up and Eren reached down at the same time. When their fingers folded together it was the easiest motion in the world. 

             Eren settled for teaching him the most basic sort of dance: the slow dance, in the style of gawky sixth graders at their first school party. It effectively _was_ that, given that they'd spent all their middle school dances with Mikasa, tearing around the darkened gym causing trouble or huddled in a corner talking about whatever insect they'd just caught. Eren got more conventionally involved in parties these days, but they weren't the sort of scenario for slow-dancing, and the appropriate candidate had always been shunted off to one side making conversation, anyway. Armin settled his hands on Eren’s shoulders, and Eren put his on Armin’s waist, and they shambled around in clumsy circles. Armin had some vague knowledge from quick jaunts through Wikipedia, out of the sort of passing interest that seized even the most diligent of students while sitting in the school computer lab after completing an assignment. _A_ _nything_ seemed interesting then. But this was different. It was far more basic than anything that had caught his interest, but even so, he kept losing track of his feet. The boards of the porch creaked uneasily beneath them, more and more cars began to pass by on the street, and they were just shuffling around unimpressively and it was fine. It was all fine.

            "That's it?", Armin asked when Eren had been quiet for a few seconds, having finished imparting all the wisdom he had. "It always looked more complicated than this."

            "Well it's not always a slow dance," Eren said. 

            "But you can't really be telling me that non-slow dances are just _this,_ only less slow. This is so...straightforward." 

            "Hey, don't you dare look down on this. This is an established and important part of any high school dance! Besides, I bet you it does get sort of difficult when done at high speed."

            Naturally, he could not restrain himself from testing it out. Within a matter of seconds they'd spun themselves dizzy. Armin's arms were around Eren's neck now and his feet were starting to lose contact with the ground, so he brought one socked foot down hard on Eren's shoe to stop their momentum before they wound up tipping over the steps or otherwise making an untimely exit from the porch. Eren just laughed and let Armin lead him in an attempted straight line, backwards.  

            “Shit,” Eren mumbled as Armin leaned back against the railing. He wanted to buy himself time to regain his balance. Eren’s own weight followed; he had one hand on the rail on each side of Armin. Armin There was some danger that they were going to tip over into the bed of daffodils, but Armin couldn’t find the space in his head to care when Eren’s gaze was half-lidded and entirely intent on him. “You’re really…”

            It had been a long, long time since Eren had dared call him cute, at least to his face. That he still _thought_ it was obvious—his mouth would scrunch over to one side and he’d make himself look away quickly, but he couldn’t compress that smile completely away. All the same, he’d caught on early that Armin felt the term implied a certain level of smallness, of fluffy helplessness, that Armin had never liked. Probably, if Eren had tried for a revival in this past winter he would have gotten at best a cold glare for it, and at worst a tirade. Armin didn’t like being condescended to—but lately…lately it had been clearer that for all that Eren was taller than Armin, stronger than him, louder than him, he’d genuinely never thought of himself as being  _better_ than him. It was not at all a condescension; it was just the bluntest way of saying what Eren felt.

            “It’s alright,” Armin said, so quietly he wasn’t sure that Eren heard him even though their noses were close enough to touch. He hadn’t even known that he could sound like that. People tended to think of him as some kind of sweet-minded angel, but he’d never seen himself as particularly gentle or soft. With Eren, though, maybe being that way wasn’t so bad—just to not be cynical or jaded, for a moment. After all, there was no real reason to be on his guard. Not with Eren. “I don’t mind.”

            “Beautiful,” Eren said, and he was grinning even before Armin reacted.

            Armin’s reaction was to yelp and drop over the rail when his elbows gave out under him. Eren went too, whether because his own centre of gravity was disturbed by the fall or because, quite simply, Armin was falling away from him and he couldn’t have that. The drop wasn't far, and was actually made quite springy what with all the plant life. 

            “Ffff,” Armin said from somewhere beneath Eren. They’d landed right in the flower bed; at least the daffodils were mostly done for the season anyway, Armin supposed. “Eren, you’re heavy.”

            “I remember you saying,” Eren said. Rather than simply move off or pick himself up, he fit his hands between Armin and the soil of the garden—not much caring how filthy he got in the process—and then hugged Armin to his chest and rolled out onto the lawn. Eren came to a halt on his side on the dewy, damp grass, and if they had let it, the momentum probably would have kept Armin rolling right along for another foot or so. But Armin had found a grip on the hem of Eren's shirt and was not going to let it go.

            Eren kissed him. It still wasn’t what Armin had been expecting when they’d started this—it wasn’t the messy, hungry, loud sort of kiss that would end up dripping down Armin’s neck, his chin, to his chest. But it felt more direct somehow, more honest, than the one’s they’d had since Historia’s party. Like Eren wasn’t bothering trying to fit himself into a particular shape anymore.

            Like they got to be whatever they wanted. And Armin kissed him back just the same way.

            When it ended Eren leaned back again he let his head rest on the grass and smiled the way he did when he had a fever. He said, “We’re going to have a lawn—”

            The domestic Eren was something Armin had really never considered before. He didn't know why that was, but now here they were, so he supposed he'd better get ready. They were going to be living together in a few months, for a few  _years_ at the very least. 

            “Residences don’t have lawns,” he said. Sometimes Armin wished he was better at getting caught up in moments, but he felt he should be realistic, since Eren so clearly wasn’t going to.

            “After!”

            “Apartments don’t either. Teachers and—whatever you’re planning to be—don’t make that much money.”

            “We’re going to have a lawn,” Eren said again, with what sounded more like certainty than optimism. “And a kitchen to sort the hell out. A dog!” Armin groaned. “And a _bedroom_ , holy fuck—I am going to sleep next to you every day— You are going to get kissed so damn much.”

            “What’s all this suburban planning? You’re supposed to be toppling governments. Don't give that up over me.”

            “Give it up—hell no. I’ll do both. Fuck, I'll be a hell of a lot _better_ at it if you're there advising me on it. And it’ll be easier if I’ve got some kind of stable place to hide out, right?”

            “You really want _me_ to be the stable one?”

            “You’ll be fine. And I’ll take a baseball bat to anyone who tries to stop us from having both.”

            Armin couldn't help but snort. 

            “…stable one it is.”

            "Are you two ready?"

            Both boys craned their necks so they could look at the sidewalk. Mikasa was standing there, without as much as a trace of surprise or exasperation on her face to find her two best friends lying on the grass in each other's arms. 

            "Um, yeah," Armin said, clambering to his feet. "I just need to grab my backpack and we'll go." 

 

            The girls' team placed third at the provincial tournament. Mikasa said it was good news, since it meant Armin and Eren would focus more on their schoolwork. And they really did need to; the rest of the school year was a condensed, frantic scramble through final presentations, culminating activities, and, at last, exams. All major scholarships were presented during the convocation ceremony, about a month after the end of the school year. What this double ceremony really meant in the end was that Armin got to feel a great rush of pride followed by a great crash of anxiety. They announced the scholarships you won right as you were crossing the stage to shake hands with a teacher and receive your diploma, which was going to put him in immediate danger of tripping over himself in front of all the graduates, all the staff, and all the family members crammed into the muggy auditorium.  

            Mikasa strode across the stage before him, of course, in full resplendence; her blue graduation gown billowed impressively, and her full soccer scholarship was announced to tremendous applause from the other graduates. Theirs wasn’t the sort of school that produced a lot of winners, at least in sports. Few students had ever come out to the games, but they could still get behind an announcement like this. One of theirs was among the best in the country. There was some pride by association; they went to the same school as this person, they walked the same hallways and ate in the same cafeteria.

            One person had to cross the stage after Mikasa before it was Armin’s turn. While he waited Armin stood just behind the curtain at stage right, trying not to fidget with the ridiculous plasticky gown that made an already hot auditorium in July feel like a sauna. He told himself it wasn’t worth worrying about scholarships, since realistically speaking he already knew the outcome. He didn't have any real hopes to dash. All he had to do was get across the stage without landing on his face. That was it. That was all.

            The teacher standing there to shepherd students out onto stage in the proper order tapped his shoulder to signal it was time for him to go. Armin gathered up his breath and stepped out into the glare of the stage lights.

            It was all somewhat surreal; he forgot what legs were, for one thing, and simply seemed to coast across the stage in a fortuitously straight line. The scholarships that were announced as he crossed were a strange, lengthy haze of syllables; he was listening for one word only, Sina, and he never heard it. He reached the teacher waiting at the other side—he was too stuck in his own head to recognize the man—shook his hand mechanically, received his diploma, moved to his seat. The graduates were to stay there on stage until their particular chunk of the alphabet had all been across; then they would all file off at stage left and take their seats in the auditorium.

            Mikasa was already waiting in her chair, one over from Armin’s own. Without a single care for the person seated between them or for the fact that they were still in full view of the audience, Mikasa reached across and squeezed Armin’s knee.

            “It’s alright,” he whispered, and meant it. It had been a foregone conclusion that he would not be getting the Sina Scholarship; he’d given up any real hope of that in December. There was a girl somewhere else in the district who had been his main competition, and he’d made the choice not to pour every drop of his life and energy into this. It was alright.

            Hell, they’d planned for this.

 

            When it was Eren’s turn he launched himself across the stage with his hand extended and his ears perked up for what turned out to be a list of scholarships nearly as long as Armin’s. They were awards for outstanding contributions to the school community, or for community service, or greatest improvement in English. Several came from local groups he'd volunteered for. None of them were huge, but he genuinely did not care. The first thing he did when the ceremony ended and he was free out in the hall was launch himself at his mother. It was the sort of hug that probably could have toppled a tree.

            Carla Jaeger was not so easily brought down. When she saw him coming sighed a bit (with a smile), braced her feet, and held her arms out for her son.

            “I did it I did it IdiditI—”

            He released her and charged for Mikasa and Armin, who had been trying to see if they could spot Armin’s grandfather in the mill of graduates and family members in the hall. If Armin had been standing there alone he absolutely would have wound up on the floor when Eren collided with him. As it was, he just found himself squashed up against the brick wall that was Mikasa as Eren tried to enfold both of them in a hug at once.

            “Achh,” Mikasa said as they were all compressed together.

            “Eren—”, Armin said.

            “It’s enough, right?”, Eren asked. He had his chin on Armin’s shoulder and his face pressed up against Mikasa’s. His grip on them hadn’t loosened at all. “You must’ve been counting—it’s enough?”

            Weeks ago Armin had taken a look at the scholarships Eren had applied for; he knew which ones were worth how much, and he’d tallied them up in his head as Eren had crossed the stage.

            “It’s enough,” Armin said. He would have tried to return the hug had his arms not been pinned to his sides. “It’s more than enough, Eren.”

            Of course it wouldn’t cover his tuition or housing—it wouldn’t even come close—but with all their savings from work and all the money from Armin’s and Mikasa’s scholarships, Armin might as well have won the Sina Scholarship after all.

            He probably would not have been any happier even if he had. He was already running at capacity.

            “You did it,” Mikasa said, and then something that Armin didn’t immediately understand: “It’s alright.”

            It wasn’t until Eren pulled back again that Armin saw why she said this. Eren was crying—grinning and crying, like he couldn’t pick one or the other. Then again, Eren was the sort of person who could and would cry if he was overwhelmed with _any_ emotion. Armin had always been a bit in awe of him for that—for being willing to just show it when he was feeling, whatever he was feeling.

            “Don’t say it like it was just me,” Eren said. “That’s bullshit.” Armin opened his mouth to speak, and Eren said, “It’s _bullshit_. It was all three of us and you can’t convince me different.”

            “We weren’t going to try,” Mikasa said.       

 

            At the start of September, when the sunlight was dusty and deep yellow and the heat of August hadn’t quite faded from the air, Armin was just finishing packing. He’d quit his job the week before so that he could focus on preparing for the move. They were leaving today, as soon as he was done. Carla was already parked out in front of his house with a car full of her own children’s belongings. Armin was packing relatively light for now, since he’d be catching a ride back the next weekend with Jean to check on his grandfather. He could haul whatever he'd forgotten with him then. 

             Getting back and forth between the city and his hometown would not be a problem. Armin’s grades had been more than enough to secure him placement in whatever residence he’d wanted, so he’d gone for a suite-style residence rather than a traditional dormer to ensure that Mikasa would stay with them. Their budget wasn't huge, but it was workable; they wouldn't be living on instant noodles, if they stuck to the guidelines Armin had set down. They'd already worked out where their classes would be, and when, and agreed that if any of them slept late the others had the right to barge into their room and drag them out of bed. Armin's timetable was crowded, but there was enough time in there to eat between classes, and Eren and Mikasa had taken solemn vows to throw all his textbooks out the window and make him watch ridiculous movies with them if they felt he was studying for too long without a break. 

            Honestly, Armin had to admit that everything was looking alright. He might have even said ‘good’—and whether or not he said it, there was a certain buzzing sensation beneath his sternum that he couldn’t write off as anxiety or dread. He was excited, and much as he wanted to get to campus and see the new city in all its detail, it wasn’t just because he was leaving this place. It was because he knew what he wanted and he was going to get it; it was because he didn’t feel like his feet were suctioned into mud.

            There was just one box left to go before they would get on the road.  Armin had forgotten to include one extremely important item, so he was rushing to do it now. He was currently, thoroughly wrapping a brown ceramic flower pot in newspaper. He'd kept the tulip out near the back door so it would still get sun. The flower itself had died months ago, and he’d restored the bulb to the flower bed in the backyard, away from the others so he’d be able to pick it out if it bloomed again and return it to what he thought of as its proper home in the pot. In the meantime, he didn’t feel much like being parted from the pot. He’d keep it on his windowsill; he’d find one of those stores in the city that sold seeds, and he’d pick something out—something loud and colourful, he thought. Red would be best. Probably he’d bring his flower meanings consultant with him. This was important business, after all.

            “I’m going to take it,” Mikasa said. She and Eren were leaning against the counter, waiting patiently. They'd been more or less in charge of moving Armin's belongings out to the car thus far, and it had inevitably become a competition. 

            “No you’re not!", Eren said. "I can do it fine.”

            “You dropped the last one.”

            “The last one was six hundred pounds of science books!”

            “If you drop this one Armin will cry. You’ll break all of his grandfather’s pots and pans.” The familiar brassy shine was gone from the walls of the kitchen. The best Armin had been able to do was argue his grandfather into keeping the largest and the smallest from each set, and he'd only done this by insisting that there was not enough room in a residence apartment for all this extravagant cookery. Even insisting on his own lack of cooking ability had not convinced his grandfather to keep the rest.

            “You’ll learn,” his grandfather had said. And Armin would have to, if he didn’t want to mangle the things.

            “I won’t cry,” Armin said as he settled the pot into the box. He folded the flaps shut and secured it with tape. When he slid it off of the table, both Eren and Mikasa started forward from the counter to take it, but Armin didn’t hesitate about easing it into Mikasa's arms. Eren looked utterly betrayed. “It’s not personal,” Armin said sheepishly.

            “Are you sure this is the last of it?”, Mikasa asked. Probably she wanted to give Eren a task, to make up for her being the selected carrier of the moment. “You have your toothbrush? Also winter clothing. You’re not good at winter clothing. You should have a scarf. Scarves are important.”

            “I—I’ll be sure to pick one up,” Armin said, “but that’s really the last of it for now.” Mikasa nodded and strode through the door with perfect ease, as if the box weighed nothing.

            Eren was still pouting over at the counter. Armin said, “I didn’t think you’d be mad. We won’t have that much time to ourselves for a while once we get there. It’s going to be welcome week; we’ll be dragged around all over campus to events, and we’ll have the neighbours over.”

            Eren’s expression turned briefly thoughtful.

            “Right,” he said slowly, and then let impulse take over. Armin met him halfway across the kitchen floor and leaned up—boosting himself a little on his toes—to kiss his boyfriend. Eren’s hands went naturally to the curve along the small of Armin’s back and stayed there even when Armin rested his weight more firmly on his heels. “You want to keep it quiet, then, once we’re there? People might get all confused about whether we’re friends or dating or—badass tutor and terrible student. Or illicitly married. Or whatever.”

            “I don’t know if illicit was ever really on the table, with you," Armin said. "And no, anyway. I don’t want it.” This had all been confusing enough, damn it; Armin didn’t want it buried. 'Show your work,' his teachers had been writing on his math tests since he'd been seven years old. He'd taken the lesson to heart, even if the work was a scribbly muddled soppy mess. “They can be confused if they want.”

            Eren nudged closer so he could press a kiss to Armin’s forehead, and then his nose.

            “That’s a relief,” he said, “because I really don’t think I’d have a chance in hell of keeping all this contained.”

            Armin sighed a little and laughed a little and dropped his forehead against Eren’s shoulder.

            “I’m going to regret saying that, aren’t I?”

            “Yep. I’m going to be screaming about it at every opportunity—look at this guy this guy loves me look at his eyes look at his hair look at his nose  _listen to him talk about literally anything it will change your life_ —!”

            “We should get going,” Armin said, because his face was getting hot and he didn’t want to arrive at his new home looking all sweaty and flattered. The drive was only an hour, after all.

            The rather smug look on Eren’s face told Armin that he knew exactly the reason for the interruption.

            “Lead the way,” he said, and Armin did so. His grandfather was out by Carla’s car at the curb, leaning down to talk to her through the window. When he heard Armin and Eren crossing the lawn he straightened and turned to face his grandson.

            “Bye grandpa,” Armin said, hugging him. “I’ll see you on the weekend.”

            “I’ll make you dinner,” his grandfather said, patting his back lightly. “Try not to work too hard.”

            "We won't let him," Eren said as he opened the car's door. 

            Eren and Armin had to share the backseat of Carla’s vehicle with a lot of their own personal effects, which were all jumbled together into one big unsalvageable mess. Mikasa was riding shotgun, mainly because there was no way all three of them were going to fit back there. Armin, crammed in between Eren and a large bundle of blankets, leaned over as far as he could so that he could wave goodbye to his grandfather. He didn’t turn from the window until the house he’d grown up in had disappeared around a corner. It didn't look so run-down or dull when it was disappearing into the distance like that. Then he looked forward, between Carla’s and Mikasa’s seats, through the windshield at the road. 

            “So who’s going to cook first?”, Eren asked almost immediately. Mikasa sighed.

            “I’ll try,” Armin said.

            "We'll all do it," Mikasa said. 

            "Well what are we making, then?", Eren asked.

            "Pasta's easy," Armin said.

            "Aim a little higher, would you? We could like roast—something, I don't know."

            "We don't have an oven."

            "We don't?! No, it said we have a stove—"

            "Which is not the same thing," Mikasa said.

            "Meat's expensive, anyway," Armin said. "I don't know if we should put down roasts as the main staple. If we're getting near the end of term and we still have enough left over, though..."

            "Well, shit. Okay. So pasta, I guess. I'll make a salad or something. And Mikasa—"

            "I'll boil the noodles." 

            Which, Armin supposed, left him to handle the sauce. Well, that was fine. He sighed and leaned back against his seat and got jabbed in the back by the handle of a loose spatula for his trouble. He snorted and squirmed and eventually, despite himself and the thrum of excitement still pulsing through him, got comfortable. His hand found Eren's before they ever even made it to the highway. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Transistasis: the ability of a system or organism to alter itself in order to adapt to the situation; a means of maintaining equilibrium in the face of changing circumstances. Sister and also antonym of homeostasis. 
> 
> I really meant to include a definition at the start of the first chapter, but entirely forgot. Sorry about that. 
> 
> Thank you for your support on this fic! It's helped to keep me motivated to keep writing, both this fic specifically and others. I realize this one didn't have as much of a...well, a plot as Homeostasis, but I really needed just some fairly mellow fic to write. This AU has been really relaxing for me, and I've needed that. I (still) do have plans for other long fics, but I'm going to put off publishing the first chapters of them ones until I'm a bit firmer in the direction they're going to take. I'll definitely still be around, though! 
> 
> Thanks again!


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